FOLLOWING A CENTURY OF
HEREDITARIAN THOUGHT, SOCIAL-ENVIRONMENTALISM HAS JUST ENJOYED
ITS OWN HALF-CENTURY AS A DOMINANT INFLUENCE IN THE MEDIA AND
THE UNIVERSITIES. LATELY, FEW PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE BEEN WILLING
TO DEFEND ANY FULL-BLOWN ENVIRONMENTALISM ABOUT PERSONALITY DIFFERENCES.
HOWEVER, FROM OUTSIDE PSYCHOLOGY, OTHERS STILL MAKE AN EFFORT
TO DECRY HEREDITARIAN IDEAS AS BEING IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE BECAUSE
ALL NATURE/NURTURE OUTCOMES ARE SUCH COMPLEX INTERACTION EFFECTS.

Thedebate about the relative importance of 'nature' and 'nurture'
is the most important, the longest-running, and the most fraught
of all those debates in psychology that occasionally appear resoluble.
(The important and ongoing debate about how the mind is related
to the body is almost as heated, but that debate usually appears
entirely non-resoluble {see Quotes IV}.)

Until the proof, in 1945,
of the scale of the Nazi Holocaust, belief in the importance of
'nature' had enjoyed a century of acceptance in the West. In the
late nineteenth-century, traditional Christian approaches to improving
people and society were unable to cope with the new problems of
urban life-rising crime, conspicuous squalor, sexual diseases
and child prostitution. After the First World War, nation-states
were increasingly expected by their enlarged electorates to do
battle with their own social problems just as they had battled
with each other militarily on an unprecedented scale, and to use
science in peace as they had in war. Two particular strategies
seemed possible. One was to control alcohol consumption by increased
taxation or by outright prohibition. The other was to prevent
the recurrence of similar social problems in future generations
by introducing society's problem-cases to sterilization, castration,
contraception or abortion-if not to the sexual restraint long
urged unavailingly by the churches. This second, futuristic route
to 'improvement' presumed problems like mental subnormality {the
'learning difficulties' of today}, schizophrenia, criminality
and alcoholism to be substantially inherited.

By 1945, it was clear for
all to see that both these major efforts toward 'improvement'
had been tried and had failed horrifically. In the USA, the 'prohibition
era' had yielded more crime, alcoholism and drug-taking
than before-together with a corruption of, and public mistrust
for the police: laws restricting alcohol consumption had led to
illicit brewing and retail, which in turn desensitized many moderate
drinkers to engaging in crime. In Nazi Germany, the initial proposals
for 'race hygiene' via eugenics had been quickly discarded
in favour of euthanasia for the mentally and physically handicapped
and state-orchestrated terror for objectors in general and for
the Jews in particular. Finally, in 1941, as the armies of the
Third Reich poured through Poland into Russia and the 'concentration'
and slave-labour camps filled up, the Holocaust was set in motion.
Now, quite regardless of health, educational attainment or IQ
(the testing of which had been banned by Hitler in 1937, apparently
to prevent the above-average IQ's of the Jews from being advertised),
five million Jews, gypsies and homosexuals lost their lives to
racial fanaticism.

After 1945, it became almost
a matter of faith in psychology that important aspects of human
personality, intelligence and rationality were mainly matters
of 'nurture' rather than 'nature'; that 'improvements' were to
be sought in education, training or psychotherapy, or by alterations
in social conditions-especially for poorer families; and that
psychology would follow the path outlined by Russian and American
behaviourism. {See QUOTES XX re 'psycho-social engineering';
and QUOTES X re the eventual Head Start programmes that
aimed to raise intelligence itself.} However, by 1970, behaviourism-with
its stress on the importance of learning and on the apparent discovery
of effective 'conditioning' procedures-had itself taken some hard
knocks in academic circles. These came partly from the growing
recognition that 'conditioning' could not account for the phenomena
of human language and symbol-using intelligence; partly from the
increasing success of amelioration of mental illness by drugs;
partly from failures of behaviour therapy to bite reliably on
many 'unwanted habits' (especially on sexual fixations and on
alcohol- and nicotine-consumption); and partly from direct empirical
investigation of the role of 'nature' in human intellect, in personality
differences, and even in social attitudes.

There are in fact three
'nature vs nurture' issues rather than just one. They concern
what is innate, what is inherited, and what is important.

(i) What is innate
to the species-in this case, homo sapiens? What features
of human behaviour and experience arise from the genes that we
all share and without most of which a human child is unlikely
to be born? Obvious possibilities are that language (or at least
a certain capacity for language) is innate to Man; ditto bipedalism-conferring
the major evolutionary advantage that we can carry things easily.
But what about the sex-role division of labour -so general a
feature of human cultures historically, but now under challenge
{see QUOTES XXII}? Proving innateness (versus dependence
on learning) of a largely species-specific characteristic-like
birdsong-may seem easy enough: we 'simply' rear a bird without
exposing it to conspecifics or their song. But we can hardly carry
out the same experiment with human children today -though the
feat was attempted by one or two rulers of the past (e.g. the
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was curious to see whether
children reared in isolation would end up speaking Hebrew, or
whether the Almighty might have graced some other language with
His approval). Today there is much discussion of 'sociobiological'
ideas as to how we evolved (perhaps as 'aquatic apes'?) and as
to what is innate (altruism?, love of our own kith and kin?, inter-racial
antipathy?); but to prove points decisively in either the
'nature' or 'nurture' direction is hard work; and such matters
are so important that many people are properly reluctant to change
their minds without decisive proof. {The suggestion of the Nobel-Prize-winning
German ethologist, Konrad Lorenz (1962, Aggression: the So-called
Evil), that human aggression is not only innate but actually
'desirable' (at least, intrinsic to distinctively human patterns
of sociality) still remains the outstandingly controversial claim
of ethology and sociobiology-though Freud, too, thought we all
had a 'death wish' of some kind that was normally channelled away
from the self, towards external targets.} Altogether, precise
attributions of important, universal human features to 'either'
nature or nurture looks quite unlikely. The incest taboo is an
obvious example: it will be maintained 'naturally' in so far as
societies are not so riven with internal strife as to put a premium
on the special co-operation that will occur between the genetically
similar offspring of incestuous unions; and it is also maintained
by religious injunction and folk memory. Again, the human sex-role
division of labour has been well-nigh universal and thus a clear
candidate to be thought 'innate'. Yet some obviously think this
may change if females continue to have access to physical force
(whether via the gun, labour-saving devices, or the police),
can delay or abjure pregnancy and child-rearing, and can rely
on their nation states to fund the education, health-care and
even child-care of their own children while they themselves go
out to work. {For presentation of modern nativist claims see e.g.
M.Ridley, 1993, The Red Queen and M.S.Gazzaniga, 1994,
Nature's Mind.}

(ii) Which differences
between us are inherited genetically from our parents?
Which characters 'breed true'-with people being more similar to
each other according our estimates of the number of genes they
share? With which traits can it be said that a 'eugenics' programme
would be likely to have some degree of at least technical success?
With this matter there are three obvious main lines of systematic
inquiry.

(a) We can look at genetically
similar (or even identical people (monozygotic (MZ) twins)) who
grow up in different environments, thus allowing us to learn whether
environmental differences, between families, contribute to final
observable ('phenotypic') differences in behaviour and personality.

(b) We can look at children
who are genetically unrelated (by population standards) and who
grow up in the same family environment-as when adoptive children
grow up alongside genetically unrelated children of similar age.

(c) We can look at pairs of
children who share the same environment, but who differ in their
degree of genetic similarity-as do MZ and DZ (dizygotic, 'fraternal')
twins. We ask whether, with environment similar for the twins
making up each pair, the greater within-pair genetic similarity
(of the MZ's) makes for greater within-pair phenotypic similarity
{as measured by intra-class correlation coefficient}.

Of course there are variants
on all these methods. For example, in the 1990's there are many
half-siblings who grow up largely apart, for example. More importantly,
each method has its own limitations. Adoptive children may have
been selected by agencies in the past as especially 'suited' to
the families to which they were assigned: thus a brown-eyed child
might not be assigned to blue-eyed adoptive parents, and a child
of a well educated biological mother might be sent to a relatively
bookish home. Investigators have tried variously to allow for,
circumvent or neglect such methodological problems. In particular,
careful attention is essential to the genotypic, phenotypic and
environmental ranges across which any particular study has been
conducted: relatively few adoptees are adopted into the extremes
of the range of human environments, for example; and twin studies
using volunteers will usually under-represent pairs carrying genes
for relatively low levels of IQ In recent years there has been
an enormous increase in high-quality psychogenetic work in many
Western countries. Interpretations remain contested in some quarters
(e.g. L.J.Kamin, 1984, Science; C.R.Brand, 1987, Nature);
but a certain amount of fresh practical advice on child-rearing
and education can be offered on the basis of the emerging research
picture (Brand, 1989, in D.Anderson, Full Circle).

(iii) How do people
come to differ as much as they do? How does phenotypic population
variance arise? Is it largely accounted by 'broadly heritable',
or genetic factors? Importantly, this question is different
from the last two, for not all genetic variance is inherited.
The best known example of this is the case of eye-colour in homo
sapiens: two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child
if each of them carries the 'recessive' gene for blue eyes as
well as the 'dominant' gene for brown eyes. Interaction between
genetic factors (epistasis) is another purely genetic phenomenon
that will not make for marked parent-child or sibling-sibling
similarity: if a certain combination of genes is crucial
to a character, within-family resemblances will be modest, since
genes segregate in the process of transmission. Tracing such minimally
transmissible effects is much harder; and, when they are found,
they may somewhat upset the interpretation of other studies: for
example, outstanding phenotypic similarity in MZ twin-pairs may
reflect epistasis as much as 'narrowly heritable' genetic
variance. Lastly, we come to entirely non-transmissible genetic
effects -as when genes mutate or when chromosomes are damaged
or appear in triplicate. (For example: 'Fragile X' and 'Down's
syndrome' are often the causes of mental retardation in children
from families having no general propensity to produce lower-IQ
children). The way ahead to the identification of further such
genetic effects is highly technical and even then serendipitous;
but at present it is widely believed by geneticists (and by some
people who are anxious about the prospect of a 'new eugenics')
that many further gene-phenotype links will be discovered as the
human genome is mapped in its entirety (see e.g. D.J.KEVLES and
L.HOOD, 1992, The Code of Codes, Harvard University Press).
It would be nice to be able to say that whatever features of personality,
intellect, psychopathology etc. cannot be attributed to genetic
features must clearly be put down to 'the environment', and vice
versa. However, psychologists long ago decided that matters
were not so simple, and modern work provides ways of firming up
this hunch.

Initially, saying that 'nature
and nurture interact'-perhaps 'inextricably' -to yield human outcomes
did little more than draw a veil over the failure of environmentalist
theories to prove their main case. To talk of genetic-environmental
interaction was more to obfuscate than to clarify. Strictly speaking,
G x E interaction occurs when an environmental difference multiplies
with a genetic value in determining phenotypic outcome: for example,
a good violin level attained by a child will probably reflect
not just 'genes for musical ability' and 'a good violin teacher',
but their interaction or multiplication-there will probably
be little attainment to show for having one but not the other.
Is such G x E interaction a powerful influence in human affairs?
Well, if there is a lot of it around, it should mean that MZ twins
will be especially similar only when they grow up in similar
environments: and this phenomenon is not readily apparent across
the range of psychometric test-score 'phenotypes'. However, many
other things have been alluded to under the heading of 'interaction
effects' by non-specialists; and the most compelling of these
is the idea that a child's development occurs as it 'interacts
with the environment'. Since virtually all children quite
literally 'interact with the environment' (with the important
exception of grossly handicapped children), it is not immediately
obvious how this observation is supposed to enable us to account
for eventual differences between children. But in recent
years, several techniques have come on stream for identifying
various forms of what is properly called genetic-environmental
covariation (G,E COV). Theoretically there are
three types of G,E COV that may help produce full
population variance:

(1) Genotype and environment
may be correlated by certain types of children being born into
certain types of environment-as with children having genes for
high-IQ [if there are such genes, of course] being born into environments
that are themselves [correctly] judged by modern educators and
social workers to be more likely to boost development.

(2) Parents, educators, etc.,
may decide to supply a certain type of environment to a certain
type of child-smiles for a pretty girl, punishment for a cheeky
boy, violins for children who seem interested and prove themselves
capable, etc.

(3) Lastly, the genotype itself
may lead its possessor to active selection of particular environment-as
the child itself comes of an age to choose its toys, treats, friends,
hobbies, school subjects etc.

These last two types of G,E
COV can usefully be called 'transaction' with the environment:
the point is that G has yielded, passively or actively, a changed
environment (whether by selection or creation) that, in its turn,
will normally be expected to influence the child further. If such
'transactions' occur, perhaps especially of type (iii), then we
could expect that children will diverge as they grow up unless
they are genetically identical. And this is just what has seemed
to happen in the few studies that have looked for the effect:
at around seven years, DZ twins are almost as similar as MZ twins;
but by adolescence the DZ's have diverged while the MZ twins have
remained as similar as they were. What seems to happen is that
the environment is not, as behaviourists could make it for their
laboratory animals, a truly independent variable operating from
outwith the 'organism'. Quite the contrary: environmental differences
between us are largely under our own control after childhood,
and psychological divergence seems to follow in line with genetic
differences that may not have expressed themselves at all until
such environmental opportunities arise. Classical environmentalists
would wish us all exposed to a limited diet of systematically
improving arrangements. They would perhaps wish all children to
be exposed to the standard British primary 'school' with its staff
trained in sociology and Piagetianism. By contrast, the 'transactionist'
will look especially at whether the environment provides variety
and choice for children, and at whether the environment
is responsive to the highly individual pressures from growing
children for intellectual and emotional development beyond the
levels that individual children have already reached. {For further
coverage of the need to differentiate treatments according to
individuals, see QUOTES XX and XXIX.}

Such are some of the main
arguments, methods and types of finding that are brought to bear
on 'nature-and-nurture' issues today. In general, enormous progress
in the direction of agreement amongst experts has occurred in
recent years, with few simple social-environmentalist claims being
left on the table-except those concerning extreme environments
that are seldom encountered in the West. This would once have
seemed a pessimistic thing to say; but it is no longer so. With
years of slight achievement for social-environmentalist techniques
behind us {see QUOTES X and XX}, and with gene replacement therapy
said to be just around the corner, probably the happiest thing
that victims of psychological ill health or 'learning difficulties'
could be told would be that their grandchildren, at least, would
be spared their condition. Whether people will be any more responsible
about the 'new eugenics' than the old will remain to be seen.
It is always possible that powerful new environmental variables-not
seen so far in the twentieth century -will come into play and
yield variance between people that would quite dwarf the human
differences that result perhaps mainly from genetic differences
today. Such overwhelmingly powerful environmental features would
presumably resemble those associated historically with religion
and associated pressures for strict socialization-an environmental
pressure for which the twentieth-century West professed little
use. More likely, increasing provision of equal opportunity and
choice-now available to children in their own homes thanks to
the proliferation of TV channels-will mean that the intellectual
and personality differences that remain in future populations
will be increasingly of genetic origin. High heritabilities
will thus be a major testimony to the achievement of equal opportunities
for all.

"Doubtless we all feel a repugnance
to assigning so little efficacy to environmental forces as the
facts of this study seem to demand; but common opinion also feels
a repugnance to believing that the mental resemblances of twins,
however caused, are as great as the physical resemblances."

"In 1948, [in Russia] the Communist
Party Central Committee officially repudiated the entire science
of genetics. Soviet academics were obliged to teach the pre-Darwinian
doctrine that acquired characteristics can be transmitted to one's
heirs.... It was not until the mid-sixties that Lysenko's scientific
nonsense was formally repudiated by Soviet authorities."

Daniel SELIGMAN, 1992, A Question
of Intelligence: the IQ Debate in America.
New York : Carol (Birch Lane).

"Wherever the theory
of inheritance of human behaviour exists there is also the possibility
of the emergence of fascism."
E.BELL & J.SERAMKI, 1964,
The Social Foundation
for Human Behavior.

"Glorification of the
'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural
society in its struggle against liberation."

Herbert MARCUSE.

"The very suggestion
that differences in personality and intellect between individuals
might depend substantially on genetic differences nowadays causes
outrage in many quarters, especially when it is suggested that
statistical differences between ethnic groups or the sexes may
be so influenced."

M.LOCKWOOD, 1985, Nature.

"....we must suspect
those who continue to espouse theories of individual differences
in personality which centre on family environment and cultural
influences, of motives other than scientific."

"....caring left-wing
ideologues have it in for Darwin to a man. After all, his theory
holds that people differ from one another! Worse, the differences
give some people an unfair advantage over others, and these advantages
can be inherited by their children - in flat contradiction to
the requirements of equality, social justice, and the abolition
of hereditary privilege. Such a wicked theory cannot possibly
be true, or if it is it shouldn't be."

David JONES, 1986, 'Believe
it or not....' The Times, 11 xii.

"Psychologists, anthropologists,
and sociologists in the early part of this century largely rejected
what they took to be a Darwinian construction of man. They insisted
that human behaviour could be understood only through culture
and the principles of learning theory. They were impatient to
utilize new techniques in order to change conditions - and consequently
the nature of man."

Robert J. RICHARDS, 1987,
Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind
and Behavior. University of Chicago Press.

"Despite intellectual acknowledgment
of the essential duality of the origins of high ability, most
individual researchers are emotionally - sometimes passionately
- attached to the defence of one extreme."

J.SLOBODA, 1993, 'Weighing of the
talents'.
Nature 362, 11 iii.

"Even in the age of the human
genome project, there are many who react with animosity and even
outrage to the proposition that our genes play a major role in
the development of specifically human behavioral traits."

P.MARLER, 1995, Contemporary
Psychology 40.

"On the one side are the pervasive
views of sociologists and political scientists who believe socio-economic
factors are the "master variable." They have allies
in anthropology, where "culture" is considered the key
shaper of behavior, among behavioral psychologists who believe
that human nature answers only to environmental conditions, and
among social workers and liberal political reformers. On the other
side are differential psychologists who believe that tested intelligence
is a good candidate for the "master variable." They
have allies in the growing number of geneticists, sociobiologists,
evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists who share the conviction
that inherited factors must be brought more into the picture.
Children in a family, raised in the same environment by and large,
often turn out quite differently. Genes matter."

R.A.GORDON, 1995, Planning for
Higher Education 23.

"Scientists are going to discover
many subtle genetic factors in the makeup of human beings. Those
discoveries will challenge the basic concepts of equality on which
our society is based."

"The moral philosophy
of the eighteenth century was richly sociobiological, especially
that in Scotland, where Adam Smith, Ferguson, Millar, and Kames,
among others, located the source of every significant pattern
of behavior in some passion, drive, or instinct. Altruism, Smith
thought, was the innate drive in man that made society possible,
just as the "instinct" to truck or barter, to buy or
sell, was the true source of the economic system."

"William James was one
of the first writers, and was the most forceful, in urging that
instinct was at the root of a good deal more of man's behaviour
than was commonly admitted.... [One] classification which has
been popularized by Tansley's The New Psychology, is that
into ego-instincts [e], herd-instincts[h],
and sex-instincts [s], corresponding to self-preservation
(and aggrandisement), tribal preservation, and racial preservation
respectively.... [By contrast, Thorndike provides] an enumeration
of one specific situation after another, with the specifically
instinctive response in each case.... Between these two extremes
is a list like that of McDougall....:

Corresponding
primary emotion
[Tansley]

e Flight, Concealment
or Immobility Fear

e Pugnacity
Anger

e Repulsion
Disgust

e Submission
Subjection

e Self-assertion
Elation

e Curiosity
Wonder

s Parental Instinct
Tender Emotion

s Reproductive
Instincts )

e Acquisition
) the emotions

e Feeding
) corresponding to which

h Gregariousness
) are not so definitely

e Construction
) named by McDougall.

Godfrey H. THOMSON, 1924,
Instinct, Intelligence and Character.

London : George Allen &
Unwin.

"My own suggestion is
that a central part of what we call 'learning' is actually better
understood as the growth of cognitive structures along an internally
directed course under the triggering and partially shaping effect
of the environment.... Innate factors permit the organism to transcend
experience, reaching a higher level of complexity that does not
reflect the limited and degenerate environment. We may usefully
think of the language faculty, the number faculty, and others,
as 'mental organs'."

Noam CHOMSKY, 1980, Rules
and Representations.
Oxford : Blackwell.

"Intelligence is structured
according to innate tendencies or propensities, presumably with
a material correlate in the brain.... The basic Aristotelian premises
of logic, like the law of the excluded middle, are common to all
peoples.... The same is true also of morality, despite cultural
differences. The Love Commandment, for instance ["Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself"] appears again and again in
widely varying cultures. Humans really do think alike.... There
is every reason to think that our morality was conferred by biological
causes."

"A long-standing dogma
in this century's social science has been that the nature of human
beings is that they have no nature, except perhaps a few highly
domain-general learning mechanisms. Evidence that such a view
is empirically untenable has been accumulating over the past decade
(D.Brown, 1991, Human Universals). [Intricate, domain-dedicated
machinery,] coupled with the social, cultural and ecological inputs
that reliably activate them [may be hypothesized for]:

"Although behaviourists
eschewed any appeal to the mental as being irremediably unscientific,
contemporary psychology....is based firmly on the causal efficacy
of beliefs and desires. Moreover, what underpins this mentalism
is a version of Cartesian rationalism that ascribes massive innate
cognitive structure to the neonate."

Neil SMITH, 1994, 'Chomsky's
revolution'. Nature 367, 10 ii 1994.

"Much of what we ascribe to
human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put
upon us by our civilization."

Frank BOAS (social anthropologist),
1928, introducing Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.
New York : William Morrow.

The importance of
evolution
{For more sociobiological
proposals, see QUOTES XVIII.}

"....evolution can properly
be defined as a natural process in time, self-varying and self-transforming
and generating increasing complexity and variety during its transformations;
and this is precisely what has been going on for all time in all
the universe. It operates everywhere and in all periods, but is
divisible into a series of three sectors or successive phases:

the inorganic or cosmic;

the organic or biological;
and

the human or psychosocial.

Each phase operates by a different
main mechanism, has a different scale and a different type of
change, and produces a different type of result.... The critical
threshold between the inorganic and the biological phase was crossed
when matter and the organisms built from it became self-reproducing;
that between the biological and the psychosocial when the mind
and the organisations generated by it became self-reproducing
in their turn....

In general, we must bring
home to the general public the possibility of real genetic improvement,
the burden it could lift off human shoulders, the hope it could
kindle in human hearts. We must make people understand that social
and cultural amelioration are not enough. If they are not to turn
into temporary palliatives or degenerate into mere environmental
tinkering, they must be combined with genetic amelioration, or
at least with the hope of it in the future."

Sir Julian HUXLEY, 1962,
The Eugenics Review 54.

"In a very real sense
the organism effectively transcends physical laws - even while
obeying them.... The necessary information [for behavioural novelty
to occur is] present, but unexpressed in the constituents. The
epigenetic building of a structure is not a creation, it is a
revelation."

J.MONOD, 1972, Chance
and Necessity.

"By the very achievements
of his mind, man has eliminated all those selecting factors which
have made that mind. It is only to be expected that humaneness
will presently begin to decay, culturally and genetically; and
it is not surprising at all the symptoms of this decay become
progressively more apparent on all sides."

Konrad LORENZ, 1976.

"The notion that we could
dispense altogether with the concept of human nature is fashionable
but it is not, I think, actually an intelligible one at all....
[Even Marx, arguing against Bentham,] remarks, 'To know what is
useful for a dog, one must study dog nature.... Applying this
to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations
etc. by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature
in general, and then with human nature modified in each historical
epoch."

Mary MIDGLEY, 1984, Wickedness.
London : Ark.

"....very many people
still make pre-evolutionary assumptions about human uniqueness,
a uniqueness that supposedly separates us in kind as well as in
degree from our simian ancestors.... (For the rightist position,
see Scruton, 1986; for the leftist position, see Lewontin, Rose
and Kamin, 1984; for a good, middle-of-the-road position, taken
by a well-known philosopher, see Rorty, 1979.).... it is suggested
[by 'pre-evolutionists'] that there is something morally and politically
unsavoury about the ideas (if not the very personalities) of those
who would claim that our evolutionary past is relevant to an understanding
of our cultural present. Terms like "reductionism" and
"genetic determinism" are bandied about....

Intelligence is structured
according to innate tendencies or propensities, presumably with
a material correlate in the brain.... The basic Aristotelian premises
of logic, like the law of the excluded middle, are common to all
peoples.... The same is true also of morality, despite cultural
differences. The Love Commandment, for instance ["Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself"] appears again and again in
widely varying cultures. Humans really do think alike.... There
is every reason to think that our morality was conferred by biological
causes."

"The outstanding feature
of human and primate puberty is the extremely long interval between
birth and the onset of sexual maturity. The teleological explanation
for such a prolonged reproductive hiatus, in which physical growth
is stretched out to a very low rate, is to accommodate the maturation
of the large brain and to optimise the opportunities for the transmission
of learning and language from one generation to the next. These
attributes have enabled man to inherit acquired as well as genetic
characteristics. This exogenetic heredity and cultural selection
are the key to the success of man in mastering the environment
and achieving supremacy over other species (R.V.Short, 1976, Proc.Roy.Soc.London).
The critical mechanism on which this strategy of deferred reproduction
is based is the brain-mediated inhibition which restrains the
hypothalamic drive to the reproductive axis. The limits of variability
in the prolonged juvenile period are genetically determined. Within
these limits, however, the onset of puberty can be advanced or
delayed by factors such as nutrition, energy demands, body size
and social interaction."

"Social practices are
concept-dependent; but, contrary to the hermeneutical tradition
in social science, they are not exhausted by their conceptual
aspect. They always have a material dimension. This is an important
consideration, as reflection on the prevalence and impact of the
phenomena of hunger, homelessness and war upon so much of human
history shows.... The two crude philosophical distinctions, between
mind and body and reasons and causes, have done untold damage
here. Thus the social structure is embedded in, conditioned by
and in turn efficacious on the rest of nature, the ecosphere.
At an epistemological level, this means that reasons, and social
forms generally, must be causes (as well as effects)."

Roy BHASKAR, 1989, Reclaiming
Reality. London : Verso.

"In an intriguing psychological
profile of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, Hildebrand (1991) uses
prospect-refuge theory to explain the consistent appeal of Wright's
architecture. According to Hildebrand, Wright's houses have a
basic motif that mixes the drama of discovery with a strong sense
of hominess. Unexpected views and refuge opportunities abound,
from the front gate through the backyard of a Wright house. An
internal, contained fireplace with a lowered ceiling and glass
doors or windows opposite gives a strong sense of refuge, balanced
by the opportunity to see out and survey the surrounding environment....
Wright's consistent use of changes in ceiling elevation and the
placement of major living spaces directly under the roof both
open up the space visually and create the comfortable sensation
of living under a tree canopy. The sense of refuge and protection
that one feels under a spreading tree canopy is certainly consistent
with an evolutionary approach to aesthetics."

"[There are two ways
in which male 'monogamous' birds] decrease the odds that their
mate will be fertilized by another male. One is mate guarding,
in which males follow their mates closely during the fertile period,
and another is frequent copulation, in which males displace the
sperm of interlopers with their own sperm." M.KIRKPATRICK,
1992, reviewing Sperm Competition in Birds. Nature
357, 7 v.

"....fitness is....thought to
be comprised of three major components: fertility, survival, and
generation time (Morton, 1982, Outline of Genetic Epidemiology).
Thus, in addition to how many offspring a person has, there is
the consideration of how many of these offspring reach the age
of fertility and yield offspring themselves, as well as how early
in life one group of offspring achieve sexual maturity compared
to another group. It is important to be explicit about this: fitness
is in essence a longitudinal concept."

J.W.GILGER, 1995, Cahiers de
Psychologie Cognitive 14.

Reservations about
the importance and value of evolution theory.

"[A Victorian lady, on
hearing Darwin's theory of evolution, exclaimed] "I pray
that it is not true; but, if it is true, I pray that it does not
become widely known.""

R.LEAKEY & R.LEWIN, Origins.
New York : E.P.Dutton.

"....I cannot accept
the wedding-cake view of levels of explanation in psychology with
culture balancing on the top. Why should we talk as if 'a dose
of social psychology' should be added on to a supposedly more
basic set of biological mechanisms? After all, socio-cultural
influences begin at birth."

R.S.HALLAM, 1985, Bulletin
of the British Psychol. Socy. 38.

"Chimps, endearingly
close to us though they clearly are (indeed, they share more than
99% of their DNA with us), can tell us very little about the genesis
of Mozart's Requiem, the Sistine Chapel or Paradise Lost."

"Darwin pointed to the
importance of biological nature as the basis of society, although
it is more difficult to work out the precise connection between
human nature and the different forms of human culture. A strong
hold on Darwinian theory certainly acts as an effective antidote
to the relativism which suggests that each society must be understood
in its own terms, and that there is nothing in common between
societies separated by time and space. [Thus] some modern neo-Darwinians
are....inclined to explain morality wholly in evolutionary terms.
Such an exercise is misconceived. Human reason, as a capacity,
may be the product of evolution; but it is sufficiently flexible
and free-ranging to detach itself from the direction of our natural
inclinations. It can even sit in judgement on them. Certainly,
evolutionary theory is more adept at dealing with the origin of
our natural sympathies and aversions, our likes and dislikes,
than in explaining the operation of human reason. Since it is
itself the product of the latter, it is wise not to over-reach
itself."

Roger TRIGG, 1988, Ideas
of Human Nature.
Oxford : Blackwell.

"In the past, psychologists
have tried to "account for" human behavior through reductions
to underlying biological mechanisms. This Newtonian ideal has
not worked, and modern science is pulling away from the efficient-cause
bias on which such reductionism ultimately rests.... The author
proposes that we distinguish between two realms of explanation
- the BIOS and the LOGOS.... It can be recognised that the BIOS
is necessary for behaving organism to exist, and thereby to take
part in the LOGOS. The LOGOS relies on formal and final causation
via patternings and orderings of meaningful relations."
J.F.RYCHLAK, 1988, to 24th International Congress of Psychology
in Sydney (S450).

"[Julian Huxley, one
of the fathers of genetic and eugenic thought in Britain, and
the first Secretary General of UNESCO,] was well aware that man
was not 'just another animal' and that human culture added a totally
different dimension to the human experience. Some of this is because
culture itself provides innumerable new and diverse environments
which must act as selective agents. But much more important is
the release culture provides from solely biological processes
and the speed with which cultural change, as compared with biological
evolution can occur. Further, in a sense that has no equivalence
in any other organism, human beings can control their own destiny,
since they can totally determine natural environments and create
cultural environments to their will."

"It is of little, if
any, scientific advance to argue that something is innate or has
a 'biological basis', or to imply that this imposes some necessary
constraints on our minds. What has been put in us, biologically,
through natural selection, may be creative, inventive and liberating,
rather than constraining."

"We are beginning to
escape from the Cartesian chains in Western thought, by looking
at the mind as "what the brain does". (By "Cartesian
chains", I mean the implied "mind/body" dualism....)
Once this Copernican Revolution is made in Western thought -
I shall not say philosophy - many conceptual problems may find
their solutions, not least in coming to terms with dyslexia, schizophrenia,
and many other human problems."

"As the primitive had
spiritualized nature, so the psychiatrist now animalizes man.
It seems that when we try to explain the human condition, we
- human beings - have a hard time finding a happy medium between
making too much or too little of intentionality: when we are culturally
underdeveloped, we treat objects as agents; when we are culturally
developed, we treat agents as objects. Thus, the primitive tries
to understand Nature in terms of human nature, while the psychiatrist
tries to understand human nature in terms of Nature. In our roles
as modern scientists, we have corrected the savage's mistake.
Who will correct the psychiatrist's mistake, and ours for supporting
it?"

Thomas SZASZ, 1987, Insanity:
the Idea and Its Consequences.
New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"We, that is our brains,
are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against
them." R.DAWKINS, 1989, The Selfish Gene (2nd
ed.).
Oxford University Press.

"There is a priori
reason to expect that embryos will resemble in formal pattern
embryos of ancestral forms more closely than the formal
patterns of adults will resemble those of ancestral adults.
This is far from what Haeckel and Herbert Spencer dreamed of in
their notion that embryology would have to follow the pathways
of phylogeny. The present phrasing is more negative: Deviation
from the beginning of the pathway is more difficult (less probable)
than deviation from later stages."

G.BATESON, 1979.

"To say there is a program in
DNA that constructs the organism is to use a misleading shorthand
or to fail to understand the problem. It is like saying that all
you need to know of how to understand high-temperature superconductors
is what they are made of and where the atoms are relative to one
another. Try that on a physicist.... Organisms are large-scale
physical systems that grow and develop, run, fly, produce leaves
and flowers and generate patterns of relationships with each other.
'Some of them even love and write poetry. Genes do none of these
things, and neither do molecules."

"Man is par excellence
an animal that learns. It is far more important to be able to
learn than to have learned. Progress in evolution is like finding
the centre of the maze. It is better for each generation to re-enter
the maze with the power of learning than to start at the point,
possibly in a blind alley, at which the previous generation finished.
Inheriting acquired characters would involve blind alleys."

"Visual experience is
essential for the establishment of the cerebral cortical circuitry
that allows normal binocular vision. For example, the pattern
of right-eye, left-eye dominance columns is permanently altered
by simply closing an eye of a young primate [D.H.Hubel et al.,
1977]."

D.J.SIMONS & P.W.LAND,
1987, Nature, 16 iv.

"The human brain probably
contains more than 10-to-the-fourteenth synapses, and there are
simply not enough genes to account for this complexity."

J.-P.CHANGEUX. Reported in
Science, 11 vii 1986.

"I do not believe that
violence is an innate characteristic of humankind, merely an unfortunate
adaptation of certain circumstances." R.LEAKEY, 1992,
in R.Leakey & R.Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: in Search
of What Makes us Human. London : Little, Brown & Co.

The importance of history,
society and culture.

"[The] sum of productive
forces, capital funds, and social forms of intercourse, which
every individual and generation finds in existence as something
given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived
as the 'substance' and 'essence' of man."

Karl MARX, German Ideology.

"History....is driven
by necessity, creating from authority that dies a new authority;
from routine broken by war, a new routine; a new illusion of finality,
of stability, in which minds are caught by their own realised
dreams."

Joyce CARY, 1947, The
Drunken Sailor.

"Like the cabbage it
so much resembles, the homo sapiens brain, having arisen
within the framework of human culture, would not be viable outside
of it."

Clifford GEERTZ, 1962, in
I.M.Scher, Theories of the Mind.
New York : Free Press of
Glencoe.

"Man is biologically
predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This
world becomes for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its
limits are set by nature; but, once constructed, this world acts
back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially
constructed world, the human organism itself is transformed. In
this same dialectic, man produces reality and thereby produces
himself."

P.L.BERGER & T.LUCKMANN,
1966, The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City,
New York : Doubleday.

"Men without culture
would be monstrosities with some useful instincts, few identifiable
feelings, and no intelligence."

Clifford GEERTZ (anthropologist),
1980. Cited in L.A.Machado,
The Right to be Intelligent.
New York : Pergamon.

"The study of the historical
past....is predicated on the assumption that there does not exist
a uniform human nature which is the same everywhere and at all
times, that human nature is in continuous change, and that the
intelligibility and coherence of human activity are to be sought,
not behind or above this ceaseless changing, but in the very change
itself.... After a century and more of discussion which now seems
in large part otiose, it ought to have become clear to us that
what scientists - basing themselves on the always provisional
assumptions and hypotheses of their various sciences - may say,
for example, about the physics and chemistry of the human body
will not settle questions worth raising about conduct, or resolve
moral dilemmas, or still feelings of spiritual inadequacy or dissatisfaction.
If the case had been otherwise, religion would long ago have been
banished to the remote and superstitious parts of the globe....

[The] metaphor of structure
and superstructure is quite inappropriate for the historian, who
will be at a loss how to decide if one particular event belongs
to the structure, and another to the superstructure. Is Lenin's
leadership of the Bolshevik revolution superstructural? Is Cleopatra's
nose structural? If changes in the price of gold are structural
in sixteenth-century Europe, are they also structural in the twentieth-century
world - and if not, why not?....

the key to history....lies
in history itself, and to try and go behind history is impossible,
indeed meaningless. History is the record of human actions -
those actions which constitute man's nature, and by doing which
man makes or constitutes himself, provides himself with an identity
and a personality."

E.KEDOURIE, 1985, The
Crossman Confessions and Other Essays. London : Mansell.

"....the "reality"
of most of us is constituted roughly into two spheres: that of
nature and that of human affairs, the former more likely to be
structured in the paradigmatic mode of logic and science, the
latter in the mode of story and narrative. The latter is centered
around the drama of human intentions and their vicissitudes; the
first around the equally compelling, equally natural idea of causation....
we manipulate or operate physically upon that which is
in the domain of cause and effect; but we interact or try to communicate
with those who seem governed by intentions. Or, as the
Navy adage had it, "salute it if it moves, otherwise paint
it"."

J.BRUNER, 1986, Actual
Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard U.P.

"Self generally is the
product of relations with others, and both master statuses [e.g.
age, sex, class and race] and personal traits can be viewed as
thoroughly interactional in source and expression."

Sheldon STRYKER, 1987, in
K.Yardley & T.Honess, Self and

Identity: Psychosocial
Perspectives. Chichester
: Wiley DePublisher.

"Mr Jasper Conran [dress
designer], dressed like a nineteenth-century courtier, told us
[in pursuit of his thesis that 'fashion is everything'] that fashion
looked forward, was the outward manifestation of change, a symbol
of development and, above all, 'a clue to life'. Without fashion,
we learned, 'there can be no survival'." Peter
HILLMORE, 1988, The Observer 5 vi. (Reporting a debate
at the Oxford Union as to whether 'Fashion is full of sound and
fury, signifying everything'. - The motion was lost, 209-to-345.)

"....if we now find ourselves
experiencing ourselves as self-contained, self-controlled individuals,
owing nothing to others for our nature as such, we need not presume
that this is a fixed or 'natural' state of affairs. Rather, it
is a form of historically dependent intelligibility requiring
for its continued sustenance a set of shared understandings. It
is a moment in a still ongoing historical process and may be reconstituted
as understandings change." J.SHOTTER & K.GERGEN, 1989,
Texts of Identity. London : Sage.

"Western mathematics
- the secret weapon of cultural imperialism - is a product of
cultural history."

"Most cultural fads and
fashions are fairly absurd. More absurd than most are fashions
which, like those of today [i.e. Beatlemania] are largely set
from 'below'. Professors, writers, intellectuals, bishops, all
take care to be discreetly 'with it', fully conversant and in
sympathy with all that wells and throbs up from the slums beneath
them."

Editorial, Daily Telegraph,
6 x 1963.

"We cannot avoid being struck
by the enormous disparity between knowledge and experience -
in the case of language, between the generative grammar that expresses
the linguistic competence of the native speaker and the meagre
and degenerate data [to which he is exposed] on the basis of which
he has constructed this grammar for himself."

"It would be wrong to suppose
that civilization developed wherever the environment was genial,
and failed to develop where it was not....[Maya] culture reached
its climax in that particular part of their extensive territory
in which the environment was least favourable.... The Sumerians
found no Garden of Eden awaiting them in Mesopotamia and the adjoining
territory at the head of the Persian Gulf, but literally made
their environment out of unpromising material by constructing
an elaborate system of canals for the drainage and watering of
their lands. A very large number of Aztecs and members of several
other Middle American tribes lived and made their gardens on artificial
islands that they themselves constructed with their hands....
It is true that less cultured tribes may be pushed aside into
exceptionally unfavourable environments, but the idea that environment
determines culture, whether at the pre-civilized or civilized
state, is untenable."

J. R. BAKER, 1974, Race.
Oxford University Press.

"Although adaptation
of an organism to its environment is the chief process directing
biological evolution, with the evolution of intelligence organisms
became more and more independent of their environments, by modifying
the environments according to their needs. This process culminated
in the evolution of mankind, which can be understood only as a
result of the interaction of two kinds of evolution, the biological
and the cultural.... Cultural evolution, however, being the emergent
result of the evolution of mind, cannot dispense with biological
preconditions; it builds on biological facts and faculties."

"Jerome Bruner {see above}
is to psychology what the Bishop of Durham is to the Church of
England: genes, IQ tests and conditioned reflexes are relegated
to the past by Bruner just as the Right Reverend David Jenkins
urges the modern faithful to dispense with unduly literal, 'cultist'
and 'idolatrous' beliefs in the Virgin Birth and 'conjuring tricks
with bones'. Bruner is a higher type of environmentalist - the
type that disdains the messy effort of trying to prove that environmentalism
is actually true. To Bruner, the major realities of the human
condition are quite obviously products of ourselves, our languages
and our 'speech acts': any heritability estimates, even if they
came out at zero, could only sully this great a priori
truth....

Bruner's perverse detachment
of the human superstructure from its infrastructure does human
nature a double disservice. It is not just that we are cut off
from our biology and from the guidance of our evolutionary history
- serving to weed out the more inane 'constructions of reality'
as this history surely does. Worse than that, Bruner's ideas about
the human superstructure are narrowly cognitive, rejoicing as
they do in the transcendent possibilities only of 'mind'....

Bruner may be right in principle
- that different 'cultures' might conceivably 'construct
their own realities'; but he is largely wrong in practice....
If we are to believe Bruner, our natural, human constructiveness
should have generated, world-wide, at least a few languages and
social systems that defy inter-translation and mutual comprehension.
In fact, there is no such phenomenon."

C.R.BRAND, 1987, Behaviour
Research & Therapy 25.

"....the social structure
is [arguably] not at all the gossamer affair that it is sometimes
portrayed to be. It has strengths which are all the greater because
they are unseen. It may seem odd to claim that faith in a religion,
or a code of conduct in science, in the English common law, or
the United States constitution rests on habits of mind with a
genetic base to them. But, however much it may go against the
grain of modern thinking to admit that some of the triumphs of
human reason are buttressed by semi-automatic forces, at least
it has to be accepted that the triumphs are likely to be more
stable if they are."

"It is easy to mistake
what we are and may be. Culture makes up our evolutionary deficit;
it may also intoxicate us, shower us with false promises. The
culture of the Enlightenment has done this, not only bemusing
us with false, deterministic, theoretical systems; but in its
dying convulsions throwing up voluntarist nightmares like those
of Jean-Paul Sartre.... For David Levy (Political Order),
the trick seems to be to grasp simultaneously that there are parts
of our nature which - like our need for friendship, family and
law - cannot be transcended, while at the same time the transformative
powers of modern technology have reduced nature to the status
of a comparable and perishable institution."

Dennis O'KEEFFE, 1989, Encounter
73.

"Shakespeare's Antonio, in The
Tempest, says that the idea of "conscience" is meaningless
to him, since, unlike a chilblain, he cannot feel it: "I
feel not / This deity in my bosom"....

It is often assumed today, especially
by post-structuralists, that the mind does not exist as a creative
agency; that there is instead a tabula rasa which reflects
in miniature the linguistic and social assumptions current in
the individual's environment."

Meg Harris WILLIAMS, 1990, Encounter
74, v.

"In an investigation of the
representation of colors by normally sighted, color-blind and
totally blind individuals (Shepard & Cooper, 1992, Psychological
Science 3), Lynn Cooper and I found evidence that....contradicts
the central tenet of the British empiricist philosophers - that
everything that each individual knows must have first entered
through that individual's own sensory experience. We asked the
individuals with the different types of normal and anomalous color
vision to judge the similarities among saturated hues under two
conditions: (a) when pairs of those hues were actually presented
(as colored papers), and (b) when the pairs of hues were merely
named (e.g. "red" compared with "orange").
We applied multidimensional scaling to the resulting similarity
data for each type of individual and for each of the two conditions
of presentation. Most striking were the results for the red-green
color-blind individuals (protans and deutans). As
expected, when the colors were actually presented to these individuals,
multidimensional scaling yielded a degenerate version of Newton's
color circle with the red and green sides of the circle collapsed
together. Significantly, however, when only the names of the colors
were presented, multidimensional scaling yielded the standard,
nondegenerated color circle obtained from color-normal individuals."

"Civilized man conceals from
himself the extent of his subordination to nature. The grandeur
of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and
win his faith. But let nature shrug, and all is ruin."

"Taking account of all Russell's
(1994, Psychol. Bull. 115) qualms, my analysis shows that
the evidence from both literate and preliterate cultures is overwhelming
in support of a universality in facial expressions.... There were
six [samples] of subjects with minimal outside contact [from the
Sadong, the Bahinemo, the South Fore and the Dani]....Significant
agreement for at least some facial expression of emotion
was obtained in five of the six studies.... In criticizing these
studies, Russell set a standard by which all research done outside
the confines of the laboratory would be discredited."

P.EKMAN, 1994, Psychological
Bulletin 115.

A plague on both your
houses!

"....Individual Psychology
diverges from the theory of determinism: no experience is in itself
a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock
of our experiences - the so-called trauma - but instead
make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined
by our experiences but are self-determined by the meaning
we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the
basis for our future life we are almost certain to be misguided
to some degree."

Alfred ADLER, 1931, What
Life Could Mean To You.
Oxford : Oneworld, 1992.

"Psychology today includes
an important school for which man is nothing other than a brute,
e.g. B.F.Skinner's behavioralism; another in which the fact that
man is an animal practically disappears, e.g. Jacques Lacan's
existential analysis; and various incoherent mixtures, e.g. Freud's
psychoanalytic theory, which wants to found itself on biology
and at the same time to account for spiritual phenomena, to the
detriment of both."

Allan BLOOM, 1987, The
Closing of the American Mind.
New York : Simon & Schuster.

Compromises?

"Man's brain lives in the twentieth
century, [but] the heart of most men lives still in the Stone
Age."

Erich FROMM, 1941, Escape from
Freedom.

"Man is biologically predestined
to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes
for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set
by nature; but, once constructed, this world acts back upon nature.
In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world,
the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic,
man produces reality and thereby produces himself."

P.L.BERGER & T.LUCKMANN, 1966,
The Social Construction of Reality.
Garden City, New York : Doubleday.

"Man is a biosocial animal,
and much of our trouble in making psychology into a science has
been the mutual antagonism of those who would only look at the
social, or only at the biological side, sometimes not even paying
lip-service to those aspects they disregarded."

H.J.EYSENCK, 1979.

|

"I suspect....Eysenck
believes in the priority of the biological. So strong is that
belief that he inadvertently belies his biosocial credo: '...the
biological aspects are prior in point of time and inescapable...'
But surely the social nature of man has as long a history as
the biological and is equally inescapable? Some four million years
ago, as now, a human or humanoid baby, we must assume, was also
dependent on a mother's care, and had to learn how to find food
and relate to other people. A non-social, purely biological human
organism is inconceivable. Social learning theory has therefore
as much {and} as little claim to priority as a biologically anchored
theory." Marie JAHODA, 1984, British Journal of Psychology
75. (Reviewing a chapter by Eysenck in Annals of
Theoretical Psychology.)

|

"A manifest gap in the
Eysenckian school of thought, and one which has sometimes made
it distasteful to others, is its lack of concern with those aspects
of the psychology of Man-feelings, ideas, motives and other experiential
data-which many believe to be the essence of 'personality'."

G.CLARIDGE, 1986, in S. &
Celia Modgil, Hans Eysenck:

Consensus and Controversy.
Brighton : Falmer.

"Although adaptation of an organism
to its environment is the chief process directing biological evolution,
with the evolution of intelligence organisms became more and more
independent of their environments, by modifying the environments
according to their needs. This process culminated in the evolution
of mankind, which can be understood only as a result of the interaction
of two kinds of evolution, the biological and the cultural....
Cultural evolution, however, being the emergent result of the
evolution of mind, cannot dispense with biological preconditions;
it builds on biological facts and faculties."

M.A.HOFMAN, 1986, to NATO Conference
on 'The evolutionary

biology of intelligence', Poppi,
Italy.

"Sackett (1968) demonstrated
that, despite their sexual ineptitude, male rhesus monkeys who
had been reared in isolation still showed signs of being sexually
aroused by the sight of female peers. This suggested that a heterosexual
orientation per se was not disrupted by social isolation,
but merely the social skills needed to express it."

Lee ELLIS & M. Ashley
AMES, 1987, Psychological Bulletin 101.

"Both G.H.Mead and J.B.Watson
accepted Darwin, and so they accepted that there was both
continuity and discontinuity [between man and other species].
It makes a dramatic difference to one's model of man, however,
depending upon where the stress falls.... Language, after all,
is a species-specific form of behaviour. The social psychology
of Mead is more firmly grounded in evolutionary biology than is
the behaviourism of either Watson or Skinner."

Robin FARR, 1987, Presidential
address to the British

Psychological Society, Bulletin
of the B.P.S. 40.

"[I advocate] a holistic
recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable
manner."

Stephen Jay GOULD, 1987,
An Urchin in the Storm. New York : Norton.

"[Wilfred Thesiger, My Kenya
Days] is critical of the Adamsons (of Born Free fame)
for having turned the lions which they reared into potential man-eaters,
because 'the lions had inevitably lost their instinctive apprehension
of human beings due to their close association with them and since
as cubs they had never been taught to hunt.' Thesiger's point
was proved when one of George Adamson's lions, having mauled a
friend's son, then killed his cook and was shot by Adamson while
it was carrying off the corpse." S. COURTAULD, 1994,
The Spectator, 23 iv.

"....the Durkheimian view favoured
by the social sciences (the individual's behaviour is dictated
by society via the processes of enculturation during childhood)
and that of evolutionary biology (society is the creation of individuals)
[might be] simply opposite sides of the same ontogenetic coin.
Of course, the individual's behaviour is dictated by its upbringing,
with many of its behavioural rules instilled by society during
childhood. But the fact that these rules exist does not mean to
say that they have always existed in that form: societies do change
and when they change they invariably do so at the behest of individuals.
Social rules as we see them now may thus be the outcome of long
periods of social negotiation in a past that we cannot see and
which have long been forgotten. This does not mean that ideologies
may not be important in driving social change or that cultural
institutions are not limited in the number of forms they can take
by internal structural coherence. Such ideas have received considerable
attention from evolutionary biologists [examples include Dawkins'
(1977) analysis of memes and Boyd and Richerson's (1985) models
of cultural evolution]. But it does mean that there may be grounds
for reinterpreting the relationship between Durkheim and Darwin
as one of differences in time-frame or perspective rather than
one of epistemology."

"[King James IV of Scotland]
put a dumb woman in Inchkeith, and gave to her two young children,
and furnished them with life's necessities for nourishment-meat,
drink, fire, candles and clothes and with all other necessities
to man or woman-wishing by this means to know what language the
children would speak when they came to lawful age. Some say they
spoke good Hebrew, but as to myself I know nothing except what
I have been told."

PITSCOTTIE, 16th Century
Scottish chronicler. Quoted by R.Grieve, 'Isolation experiments
on children's language.' In George W.G.Montgomery, Language
for the Eye: an Anthology of Deaf Writing and Publishing.
Edinburgh, Donaldson's College : Scottish Workshop Publications.

"Enough has been said [here]
to prove that an extremely close personal resemblance frequently
exists between twins of the same sex. and that, although the resemblance
usually diminishes as they grow into manhood and womanhood, some
cases occur in which the resemblance is lessened in a hardly perceptible
degree."

Francis GALTON, 1875, 'The history
of twins, as a criterion of the relative powers of nature and
nurture.' Fraser's Magazine 92.

{It was not realize till the 1920's
that there are two types of twin, monozygotic and dizygotic.}

"The interaction of nature
and circumstances is very close, and it is impossible to separate
them with precision.... We need not, however, be hypercritical
about distinctions; we know that the bulk of the respective provinces
of nature and nurture are totally different, although the frontier
between them may be uncertain, and we are perfectly justified
in attempting to appraise their relative importance."

Francis GALTON, 1883, Inquiries
into Human Faculty and its

Development.
London : Dent, 1907.

"It is true that a key
assumption of the ordinary twin method is that identical twins
and fraternal twins experience approximately comparable trait-relevant
environmental influences. Considerable evidence suggests that
this assumption is valid (Bouchard, 1984, in S.W.Fox, Individuality
and Determinism); but such technical and often indirect evidence
will rarely persuade confirmed environmentalists. It is important,
however, to point out that if the environmental explanation were
true there would have to be sizeable correlations between similarity
in the treatment of twins and similarity in their personalities.
The evidence available suggests the contrary (R.Nichols, 1978,
Homo 29)."

T.J.BOUCHARD, 1987, in S.
& Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen:

Consensus and Controversy.
Brighton : Falmer.

"Plomin's group [of psychogeneticists,
in Pennsylvania] employs a technique called allelic association
which uses large samples of unrelated individuals at the two extremes
of the IQ range and analyses DNA markers in or close to genes
having products of prima facie neurological relevance (such
as dopamine receptor protein and neurofilament protein)."

J.SLOBODA, 1993, Nature
362, 11 iii.

"....our main conclusion
after some years of work on this problem is that mathematical
estimates of heritability tell us almost nothing about anything
important."

C.JENCKS, 1972, Inequality.
New York : Basic Books.

"....in the absence of
experimental controls in which genetically identical individuals
are assigned at conception to different random environments,
the confounding effects of the environment (intra-uterine and
external) with the genotype can never be eliminated."
K.RICHARDSON & J.M.BYNNER, 1984, International Journal
of Psychology 19.

"Am I precluding the study of
human behavior genetics? Not at all....I {merely} believe that
the realm of the possible is far more circumscribed than has been
recognized in the current largely worthless literature being produced
by the careerists (Plomin, 1989, 1990; Bouchard et al., 1990).
The task of a scientifically sound human behavior genetics is
challenging but not impossible of execution. It will involve studying
the behavioral consequences of known genes."

J.HIRSCH, 1990, Cahiers de Psychologie
Cognitive 10.

"It amazes me how many graduate
students and even colleagues think that giving a psychological
test to monozygotic and dizygotic twins makes one a geneticist.
The number of naive estimates of h² from twin correlations
published in the literature with no mention whatsoever of profound
methodological problems is symptomatic of the malaise."

D.WAHLSTEN, 1990, Cahiers de
Psychologie Cognitive 10.

"[Burn & Goodship found
that of one MZ twin, by the process of inactivation of the surplus
X chromosome] had an excess of the mother's X, the other was just
as likely to have only the father's, or some of the mother's and
some of the father's, or all of the mother's-it didn't seem to
matter. Yet the MZ girls as a group showed more skewing than DZ
girls. "Whatever causes identical twinning, these studies
show that even though identical twins share the same genes, a
genetic trait does not have to be shared," Burn says. "The
English language is misleading in calling these twins identical-perhaps
we should use the German term eineiige, 'one-egg'."
....A few identical twins are so different that they don't resemble
each other any more closely than ordinary siblings. Some researchers
suspect that certain differences, particularly in behavior, result
from their separating early in embryogenesis, and therefore coming
to term in separate placentas."

Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'

New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.

"Donald Hebb doubted
the possibility of estimating heritability at all, and compared
the effort to sort our the relative contributions of heredity
and environment to obviously absurd efforts to sort out which
is more important in deciding the size of a field-its length or
breadth.... We must re-phrase Hebb: given a large number of rectangular
fields, which is more influential in affecting differences in
size between them - length or width, and is there any interaction
between the two? That is a question which is quite easy to answer,
using the statistical techniques known as analysis of variance;....
it is certainly not nonsensical or unanswerable."

H.J.EYSENCK, 1981.

"[Steven Rose, in his
letter on 'The Burt business' says] the heritability of human
traits cannot be determined because humans cannot be selectively
bred. On the contrary, virtually every textbook on human genetics
describes procedures for heritability estimation. Half of the
articles in the most recent issue of Genetic Epidemiology,
the premier international journal devoted exclusively to analytical
methods in human genetics, report heritability estimates or describe
methods for heritability estimation."

D.BRATKO (University of Zagreb),
1995, from the abstract of an address to International Society
for the Study of Individual Differences, meeting in Warsaw.

"From the first few months of
life, 40 per cent of babies fail to show much reaction to novel
stimuli, such as unfamiliar speech and colourful moving mobiles.
At the other extreme, there are 20 per cent of young infants who
are highly reactive, showing fretful behaviour and thrashing limb
movements to these stimuli. Such early classifications turn out
to be powerful predictors of uninhibited/inhibited behaviour in
later childhood."

Kerry SIMS, 1995, Times Higher
Educational Supplement, 22 xii.

(Reviewing J.Kagan, Galen's Prophecy:
Temperament in Human Nature.)

Hereditarian proposals
about differences

A little background:

"My dear Adele,

I am four years old and I
can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives
and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry.
I can cast up any Sum in addition and can multiply by 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8, , 10 . I can also say the pence table. I read French
a little and I know the Clock."

Francis Galton (aged 4,
to his sister and tutor, Adele).In

K.PEARSON, The Life,
Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, Vol. I.

"I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait
and trace, Through time to times anon, And
leaping from place to place Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can In curve
and voice and eye Despise the human span Of
durance - that is I; The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die." Thomas HARDY, 'Heredity'.

"I propose to show that
a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly
the same limitations as are the form and physical features of
the whole organic world.... ...I have no patience with the hypothesis
occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales
written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty
much alike.... It is in the most unqualified way that I object
to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery,
the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a
chain of proofs to the contrary."

Francis GALTON, 1869, Hereditary
Genius. London : Macmillan.

"I propose to show that a man's
natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the
same limitations as are the form and physical features of the
whole organic world."

GALTON, 1869, Hereditary Genius.

"It has now been demonstrated
that.... a single gene is sufficient to account for a wide range
of facts about human asymmetries for speech and handedness."

Marian ANNETT, 1978.

"It would seem natural
to suppose that, as we grew older, the differences in our vocations
[in business and the clergy] would have increased the divergence
in our characters. On the contrary, we think that for the last
few years we have been growing more alike."

Statement to Galton by his
monozygotic twin nephews.

Cited by R.E.Fancher, 1985,
History of Psychology Newsletter 17.

"If ever there were an
exemplar of inborn mathematical ability it would be Srinirasa
Ramanujan, a poor, uneducated Indian, born 100 years ago, who
was one of the greatest and most unusual mathematical geniuses
who ever lived.... Although his family was of the middle class
[in India of the 1890's], he was actually very poor. Ramanujan,
his brother and his parents lived in a one-room adobe home. His
entire mathematical education seems to have been gleaned from
only two [not particularly good] books.... In 1909, when he was
22, he married a nine-year-old, Srimatni Janki, and took a clerical
position in the Madras Port Trust Office to support her and his
mother, who lived with the young couple. While he worked as a
clerk, Ramanujan [poured out] math results, using excess wrapping
paper from the office to scribble down his formulas. He was so
obsessed with his mathematics, in fact, that he did not want to
stop to eat.... [His wife} and Ramanujan's mother used to feed
Ramanujan at mealtimes so that he would be free to continue writing
while he ate.... Carlos Moreno, of the City University of New
York, says that Ramanujan's work in the area of number theory
is exactly what physicists need when they work on the 26-dimensional
mathematical models of string theory.... It can at least be argued
that, for Ramanujan, a formal education was almost beside the
point."

Gina KOLATA, 1987, Science
236, 19 vi.

"Gedda (1960) reported
that, in 351 sets of twins, 94 per cent of monozygotic (identical)
twins agreed in their degree of participation in sport, whereas
only 15 per cent of dizygotes did so."

J.RADFORD, 1990, Child
Prodigies and Early Achievers.

New York : Free Press.

"On the traditional theory
[of 'blended inheritance'], as Galton saw, the real difficulty
was, not so much to understand why brilliant fathers beget brilliant
children or why feebleminded parents should have feebleminded
offspring, but rather to explain how such exceptional individuals
could have emerged in the first place. Galton therefore, who by
an odd coincidence was born in the same year as Mendel, proposed
to substitute a hypothesis of particulate inheritance for blended
inheritance.... Both for believers in blended inheritance and
for those who reject any notion of innate mental difference, one
of the most baffling results of school surveys is the occurrence,
not only of extremely dull children in the families of the well-to-do
professional classes, but also of extremely bright children in
families where the dullness of the parents and their total lack
of culture would, one might imagine, have doomed their offspring
to hopeless failure. With the Mendelian hypothesis, these anomalies
are just what we should anticipate." Sir Cyril BURT,
circa 1970, in C.James, Modern Concepts of Intelligence.
94, Chatsworth Road, Croydon : R.S.Reid.

"Human geneticists, psychologists
and scientists in other fields have established that all psychological
traits, including intelligence, mental illness, homosexuality,
musical ability and talent, and criminality, possess a significant
genetic component."

"....it is now generally
agreed that at least half of the total variance in personality
traits is due to genetic causes, and indeed their contribution
may be even larger than that."

H.J.EYSENCK & M.W.EYSENCK,
1985,

Personality and Individual
Differences. New York : Plenum.

"Leadership, traditionalism
and obedience to authority - the sorts of values on which empires
are built - are traits largely inherited from our parents, according
to a radical new study from the University of Minnesota that has
shattered the widespread belief that such values are learned."

Report in The Irish Times,
8 xii 1986.

"Like others who have
studied twins reared apart, we have been impressed by the remarkable
similarity of most MZ-apart co-twins - not just in those dimensions
of aptitude, personality, or interest that we are able to measure
(e.g. degree of superstitiousness), but in idiographic traits
that cannot be measured in the usual sense of that term. Examples
include aspects of personal style, forms of expressive behaviour,
pace and tempo of speech and movement, reaction to stress and
excitement, postures unconsciously adopted while standing or sitting,
specific fears (e.g. heights, confined spaces), focal interests
(e.g. working with dogs, making guns), unusual habitual behaviors
(e.g. giggling, obsessively counting things, leaving love notes
about the house, and pretending to sneeze while on crowded elevators."

T.J.BOUCHARD (Univ. Minnesota)
et al., 1986, in A.Demirjian,

Human Growth: a Multidisciplinary
Review. London : Taylor & Francis.

"The results from the
classical twin study method of comparing MZ and DZ intraclass
correlations, and those from the newer, model-fitting approaches,
are in good agreement in assigning approximately 50% of the twins'
variance in altruism, empathy, nurturance, aggressiveness, and
assertiveness to additive genetic influence."

J.P.RUSHTON et al.,
1986,

Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 50.

"Identical twin brothers
re-wrote the RAF's history books yesterday when they shared a
coveted honour awarded to trainee officers. Flying Officers Egryn
and Niall Huskisson, aged 21, won the Sword of Merit after superiors
at Cranwell College, the RAF's officer training college in Lincolnshire,
rated them equally highly. It was the first time in the RAF's
69-year history that the prize had been awarded to two people."
The Times, 30 i 1987.

"In this report, we apply
a recently developed multiple regression analysis to data collected
from a sample of 64 pairs of identical twins and 55 pairs of fraternal
twins [mean age of all twins = 12.7 years] in which at least one
member of the pair is reading-disabled, and present [perhaps the
first definitive] evidence for a significant genetic aetiology."

J.C.DEFRIES, D.W.FULKER &
M.C.LaBUDA, 1987, Nature 329, 8 x.

"The Minnesota Study
of Twins Reared Apart is an eight-year-old research program which
focuses on identical and fraternal twins reared apart from very
early in life.... [Our] results, unlike findings from the majority
of previous twin studies, are based on samples of mature adults,
and very strongly support the hypothesis that both personality
development and the development of mental abilities are significantly
governed by a chronogenetic system [which] results in convergent
development even in the face of environmental forces that would
be expected to result in divergent development."

T.J.BOUCHARD, Jr., 1988,
to 24th International Congress of

Psychology, in Sydney (Abstract
F563).

"The Queen has always
maintained that, from the earliest age, all her four children
had distinguishably different personalities. Charles was always
sweet-natured and thoughtful.... There was always a hint of restraint,
even withdrawal, unlike his outgoing sister, who always did the
waving when they were in a car together."

'Spectrum' feature, The
Times, 5 ix 1988.

"My mother always said
to me: 'You know, if you had a decent father you could have been
a lawyer'."

"A unique recent study
of MZ and DZ twins raised together and apart....has confirmed
the typical heritability of .50 across diverse traits, including....aggression,
behavioral restraint and traditional morality." J.P.RUSHTON,
1989, Journal of Research in Personality 23.

"Just as I inherited
God-given talents in terms of co-ordination, eye for a ball, and
sporting flair, they have been accompanied in my genes by traits
of character, and these, too, shape my approach to cricket."

David Gower (Captain of the
English cricket team), 1989,

interviewed by H.McILVANNEY,
The Observer, 21 v.

"....virtually all
human traits have a genetic and biological basis, which is partly
responsible for individual differences in these traits. This holds
for height, lung capacity, shoe size, sperm count, intelligence,
compulsivity, criminality, and numerous other characteristics,
including substance abuse."

L.MILLER, 1990, Journal
of Substance Abuse.

"There is a moderate
genetic influence on all aspects of tobacco dependence, and light
and heavy smoking may be influenced by different genes. These
are the conclusions of a study from the United States based on
data from the National Research Council's twin registry [which
yielded information on 4,775 pairs of twins].... One of the strongest
genetic effects was in light smokers, and this was found to be
different from the inherited predisposition to the severe dependence
of heavy smokers."

Medical Monitor, 27
xi 1992.

"The intraclass correlation
for MZA pairs {i.e. for pairs of monozygotic twins reared apart}
is the best single estimate of broad-sense heritability, assuming
that selective placement and other types of correlated environments
are unimportant [for the trait in question}. [In our sample, using
the 46 MZA pairs from Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging (SATSA)
(average age at testing 66)], the MZA intraclass correlation (residualized
for age and gender) was .78 for the first principal component
{of mental abilities, i.e. the g factor}.... Resemblance
of SATSA twins reared apart for cognitive abilities is independent
of age at separation, degree of separation, and the number of
years separated {most commonly eleven years, beginning by the
first birthday}. {67 MZT pairs (monozygotic pairs reared together)
showed an intraclass correlation of .80.} Heritability is
estimated to be about 80% for the first principal component, which
can be viewed as a measure of general cognitive ability....

Finding genetic influence
for general cognitive ability is greater in mid-life and late
life than in earlier years is particularly interesting for two
reasons. First, this finding is contrary to assumptions that environmental
influences become proportionally more important for individual
differences during the life course. Second, it fits with a general
prediction made in developmental behavioral genetics: When heritability
changes during development, it increases (Plomin, 1986,
Development, Genetics and Psychology). In the case of cognitive
abilities, this increase appears to reach a plateau in mid-life.

Also of interest is the finding
of nonadditive genetic variance. {For the Swedish DZA (fraternal
reared-apart) twins were correlated at only .32; and DZT pairs
correlated only .22.} Although genetic influence on cognitive
abilities has been assumed to be additive, evidence for nonadditive
genetic variance on IQ has recently been reported (Chipuer et
al., 1990, Intelligence 14).... A preponderance of
nonadditive variance suggests that the phenotype may have been
subjected to natural selection." N.L.PEDERSEN, R.PLOMIN,
J.R.NESSELROADE & G.E.McCLEARN, 1992, 'A quantitative genetic
analysis of cognitive abilities during the second half of the
life span'. Psychological Science 3.

"....heritabilities of
about .40 to .50 are ubiquitous for virtually all traits measured
with ordinary psychological tests.... Intelligence is an exception
as it yields higher heritabilities."

"Genetic analysis of
data from 2,680 adult Australian twin pairs demonstrated significant
genetic contributions to variation in scores on the Harm Avoidance,
Novelty Seeking, and Reward Dependence scales of Cloninger's Tridimensional
Personality Questionnaire, accounting for between 54% and 61%
of the stable variation in these traits."

"The Germanic peoples (the Germans,
Dutch, Flemings, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Scandinavians,
Goths, Burgundians and Vandals) who founded so many of the modern
states of Europe following the demise of the Roman Empire, carried
the concept of heredity to its logical conclusion in their virtually
unique system of kinship. Unlike their kinsmen, the Greeks, Italics,
Celts, Slavs and East Balts, they did not organize themselves
in patrilineal clans and phratries which recognized only their
father's kinfolk, but saw kinship in fully genetic terms. The
Germanic "kindred" comprised all the individual's relatives
on both the paternal and the maternal sides, assessing the degree
of closeness according to their actual genetic relationship. This
was a quite different system from the concept of patrilineal or
matrilineal clans so widespread amongst other peoples of the world."

"Of all vulgar modes
of escaping from the consideration of the social and moral influences
on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the
diversities of human conduct and character to inherent original
natural differences."

John Stuart MILL, 1848, Principles
of Political Economy.

"There is not one jot or tittle
of evidence of any genetic basis for any behavioral trait, except
schizophrenia-whether it be intelligence or nastiness or aggressiveness.
And given the finite resources which support scientists in their
playgrounds, it is a waste of taxpayers' money to study IQ heredity
or other genetic components of human personality."

R.C.Lewontin, 1976, reported in
Times, 26 x. Cited by

R.Travis Osborne, 1980, Twins:
Black and White. Foundation

for Human Understanding: Alexandria,
VA ; Athens, GA.

"For all we know, the
heritability [of IQ] may be zero or fifty per cent.... The great
importance attached by [genetic] determinists to the demonstration
of heritability is a consequence of their erroneous belief that
heritability means unchangeability."

S.ROSE, L.KAMIN & R.LEWONTIN,
1984, Not in Our Genes.

Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"Until the advent of
modern psychology it was almost universally denied that parents
could have anything to do with the emotional disturbances seen
in their children; "bad" children were just "bad"
seeds and had to be beaten brutally to have the "badness"
knocked out of them. Such an attitude is characteristic of a hate
culture."

Reuben FINE, 1985, The
Meaning of Love in Human Experience.

New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"Research into the personalities
of monozygotic and dizygotic twins (e.g. H.H.Goldsmith & I.I.Gottesman,
1981, Child Development 52) yields moderate estimates of
the heritability of "extroversion", "anxiety",
"persistence" and "fearfulness". However,
because twin data are used, even these moderate heritabilities
are likely to be overestimates. This evidence that personality
traits owe little to inheritance probably goes against popular
belief."

R.McHENRY, 1986, in R. Harré
& R.Lamb, The Dictionary of

Developmental and Educational
Psychology. Oxford
: Blackwell.

"Evidence that monozygotic
twins are more similar than dizygotic twins in their views of
the death penalty, white superiority, and water fluoridation (N.G.Martin
et al., 1986, Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci. USA 83) hardly
demonstrates that these traits are genetically determined. That
genetically identical individuals should develop similar personae
is not surprising. Convergence in the personal views of monozygotic
twins might be fostered by the treatment they receive from their
parents, teachers and peers; by the manner in which their phenotypic
resemblance influences their interactions with one another; and
quite possibly by some similarity in temperament that may indeed
by genetically influenced. Beyond this, any claim that the development
or acquisition of opinions....is genetically specified....or that
variation in these traits is overwhelmingly attributable to additive
genetic effects is preposterous!" B.WALDMAN, 1989, Behavioral
& Brain Sciences 12.

"Helvetius (1758 De
L'Esprit) maintained that men were wholly the product of their
environment, and infinitely malleable by education."

L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1987, The
Shaping of Modern Psychology.

London : Routledge.

"All the men we meet
with, nine parts out of ten, or perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred,
are what they are, good or evil, by their education."

John LOCKE.

"The difference between the
most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common
street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature
as from habit, custom and education."

Adam SMITH, The Wealth of Nations.

"Many of the causes inducing
intellectual derangement....have their origin not in individual
passions or feelings, but in the state of society at large; and
the more artificial, i.e. civilised, society is, the more do these
causes multiply and extensively operate."

George Burrows, 1828. Cited
in G.ROSEN, Madness in Society.

New York ; Harper & Row,
1969.

"If education cannot
do everything, there is little it cannot do."

John Stuart MILL, 1848, Principles
of Political Economy.

"We believe that the
80% of [the population that are normally two-handed persons, i.e.
ambidextrous,] are made one-handed SOLELY by the pressure of early
influences and training, in which nurses, mothers, teachers and
an uncompromising prejudice unite their misdirected forces with
a determination and persistency that Mrs Grundy herself has never
approached."

J.JACKSON, 1905, Ambidexterity.

"The sentiments of an
adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast
husk of education."

Bertrand RUSSELL, 1928.

"There are inheritable
differences in structure, but we no longer believe in inherited
capacities.... Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my
own world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to train any
one of them to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor,
lawyer, artist, merchant chief, and even beggar-man or thief."

J.B.WATSON, 1931, Behaviourism.

London : Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner & Co.

"All personality traits
are acquired and maintained through learning."

G.W.KISKER, 1977, The
Disorganized Personality, 3rd edn.

New York : McGraw Hill.

"Genes and glands are
obviously important, but social learning also has a dramatic role.
Imagine the enormous differences that would be found in the personalities
of twins with identical genetic endowments if they were raised
apart in two different families or, even more striking, in two
totally different cultures. Through social learning, vast differences
develop among people in their reactions to most of the stimuli
they face in daily life."

Walter MISCHEL, 1981, Introduction
to Personality.

New York : Holt, Rinehart
& Winston.

"Among the 97 neglected
or abused children, 44 had become criminal, alcoholic, mentally
ill or had died before reaching age 35; and 53 showed none of
these signs of being damaged."

J.McCORD, 1983, Child
Abuse and Neglect 7.

"Nothing is abnormal
or unacceptable and everything can be understood in terms of early
experience."

Judy COOPER, 1985, Bulletin
of the British Psychological Society.

"[I advocate] a holistic recognition
that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner."

Stephen Jay GOULD, 1987, An Urchin
in the Storm.

New York : Norton.

"America's new Secretary
of State, James Baker III, had an upbringing that would be painfully
familiar to a survivor of an old-style English public school.
His father, James Baker II, used to douse his only son with cold
water if he slept past 7a.m..... Baker's work habits today-like
Margaret Thatcher, he lives and breathes his job-are a product
of his father's hard-driving style; his younger sister is said
to have been so unhinged by the prodding that she became "unhinged"
and spent three decades in and out of mental homes."

'Profile of James Baker',
Sunday Times, 26 ii 1989.

"Nearly 52% of [prominent
twentieth-century psychologists] were found to have been either
first-borns or only children, a figure significantly higher than
one would have expected given the number of siblings [median =
2] present in their families.... Intelligence tests were devised
and refined by two only children (Binet and Stern), and then made
mathematically sophisticated by two first-borns (Thurstone and
Burt)."

W.S.TERRY, 1989, The Psychological
Record 39.

"....younger children
[especially] and children from lower social classes are
more susceptible to the influence of TV commercials than other
children."

"Galton followed up cases
of great mental similarity between twins, and also great dissimilarity,
which not infrequently occurs. If home identity were the cause
of the similarity, one would expect twins brought up in different
homes frequently to show dissimilar mentalities. But in fact,
in Galton's data, twins brought up in the one home were often
as dissimilar as were those brought up in different homes (having
been separated at or near birth). Their similarity appeared to
be independent of the environment....

Dr [Kate] Gordon (see Elderton,
Biometrika, 1923) tested the intelligence of over 200 pairs
of siblings, all 400 of whom had lived for ten years and more,
not in their separate homes, but in three orphanages in California.
Here there is no home environment tending to make brother and
sister both better, or both worse, than the average. The common
orphanage environment could not make brother and sister resemble
each other any more than it made any boy resemble any girl inmate.
But the siblings still showed a strong mental similarity in their
departure from the average, with a correlation of .52 practically
identical with that found for home-dwelling siblings."

Godfrey H. THOMSON, 1924,
Instinct, Intelligence and Character.

London : George Allen &
Unwin.

"....inequality is recreated
anew in each generation, even among people who start life in essentially
identical circumstances."

C.JENCKS, 1972, Inequality.
Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"By and large, the more
significant the question is, the less capable is sociology of
giving an answer. And that inability has a great deal to do with
the partially indeterminate, or self-determined character
of human behavior."

Pierre Van den BERGHE, 1975,
Man in Society.

"Whenever social explanations
are offered for mental disorder, the possibility has to be faced
that the latter phenomena are so largely determined by genetic,
intra-uterine or birth-related factors that little room is left
for the influence of interpersonal events.... It has to be admitted
that, despite all the clinical and research activity in this area,
there is as yet little incontrovertible proof of there being social
causes of mental disorder."

J.ORFORD, 1976, The Social
Psychology of Mental Disorder.

Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"At least half of the
children born into a disadvantaged home do not repeat the pattern
of disadvantage in the next generation."

Michael RUTTER and Nicola
MADGE, 1976, Cycles of Disadvantage.

London : Heinemann.

"It is not so much the
genetic psychometrist who oversimplifies the situation as it is
the environmentalist, who attempts to explain all phenotypic variations
in terms of a single variable of stimulation versus deprived
environment." P.E.VERNON, 1979.

"The most challenging
fact from twin-family studies of the past quarter of a century
is that the results provide no evidence that shared environmental
factors influence personality development. This is not a bias
of the twin method itself, since the same analyses applied to
IQ provide, indeed demand, that a significant proportion of the
variance be attributed to common environmental effects."

R.ROSE, 1982, Science.

"Our data suggest....that
newspapers have no power to mould the political attitudes of their
own readers."

W.L.MILLER et al.,
1982, British Journal of Political Science.

"No environmental factor
has been shown to produce [schizophrenic] illness with even moderate
probability in anyone unrelated to an index case."

H.FREEMAN, 1983, Times
Higher Educational Supplement, 8 iv.

"If....high socio-economic
status, a stimulating home environment, and bright parents all
contribute to genius, then every child in a given family should
have the same shot at success. But how many people have heard
of the siblings of Bach, Rembrandt, Cervantes, Descartes,
Darwin, Gandhi, or Sun Yat-sen?"

D.K.SIMONTON, 1984, Genius,
Creativity and Leadership.

Cambridge, Massachusetts
: Harvard University Press.

"....any sort of normal
human environment is all you need to do a perfectly good job of
rearing an infant.... Any parent of more than one child knows
darn well how different those children are. I don't think most
parents believe that they really shape a child's future dramatically."

Sandra Scarr (developmental
psychologist and psychogeneticist),

interviewed in Psychology
Today, v 1984.

"Both {post-Freudian}
psychoanalysis and behaviourism suffered from extreme environmentalism
- in particular, social environmentalism - and long remained
dismissive of evidence that major psychiatric ailments were of
partly genetic and individual origin and were remediable primarily
by chemical treatments."

C.R.BRAND, 1985, The Listener,
19 ix.

"All personality dimensions,
irrespective of the questionnaire from which they are derived,
show that about half the variation [amongst testees] is due to
additive genetic effects (more if test unreliability is taken
into account) and the remainder to specific within-family
environmental variance.... In practical terms, we have a situation
where parents exert no general effects over personality
development in [all] their children."

"....shared experiences
involved in growing up in the same family do not make family members
more similar to one another."

R.PLOMIN, 1986, Journal
of Personality 54.

"In a study of 573 pairs
of adult twins, 50% of the variance on each scale ['altruism',
'empathy', 'nurturance', 'aggressiveness' and 'assertiveness']
was found to be associated with genetic effects, virtually 0%
with the twins' common environment, and the remaining 50% with
each twin's specific environment."

J.P.RUSHTON et al.,
1986,

Journal of Personality
& Social Psychology.

"The harder you look
at the facts, the more ephemeral appears the connection between
diet and disease." J.ADAMS, 1987, New Scientist
1543, 15 i.

"Although the environment
plays a substantial role in the genesis of individual differences,
it seems that the most important environmental effects serve to
differentiate members of the same family. That is, the main sources
of environmental variation in personality are of an "accidental"
rather than "cultural" kind."

L.J.EAVES, H.J.EYSENCK &
N.G.MARTIN, 1989,

Genes, Culture and Personality.
London : Academic.

"Genes seem to continue
actively contributing to intellectual variation at least into
early adulthood, whereas the effect of shared family environment
appears to be largely inertial after early childhood."

J.C.LOEHLIN, J.M.HORN &
L.WILLERMAN, 1989, Child Development 60.

"Gillian [Blyton], now
Mrs Donald Baverstock, has recalled blissful hours with her mother
[Enid Blyton, the children's writer] - country walks, picking
wild flowers, witty stories. "All those sunsets and birdsongs
she wrote about genuinely meant a lot to her, and these she gave
to me." {By contrast,} Imogen [Enid Blyton's other daughter]
was different: unable to appreciate what she had to give. But
where does the fault lie? Some children are easy to like, others
less so. The child Imogen was sullen, sour and rebellious, suspicious,
defensive and "downright rude", unlike her outgoing
sister. "I was horrible," she says. "It's a relief
to be able to say it."" Valerie GROVE, 1989, Sunday
Times, 26 ii.

"One belief that is distinctive
of the twentieth century is that it is your childhood that makes
you what you are. I don't really go along with that."

David HARE (British left-wing
playwright), 1989, interviewed by

Sue Lawley, 'Desert Island
Disks'. BBC Radio IV (UK), 3 iii.

"As Bloch (1977, Man 12)
says, it is the "professional malpractice of anthropologists
to exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures." Nor
is the most damaging aspect of this dynamic the professionally
cultivated credulousness about the claim of wonders in remote
parts of the world, which has led anthropologists routinely to
embrace, perpetuate and defend not only gross errors (see Freeman,
1983, on Mead and Samoa; Suggs, 1971, on Linton and the Marquesa)
but also obvious hoaxes (e.g. Castaneda's UCLA dissertation on
Don Juan; or the gentle "Tasaday", which were manufactured
by officials of the Marcos regime)." The most scientifically
damaging aspect of this value system has been that it leads anthropologists
to actively reject conceptual frameworks that identify meaningful
dimensions of cross-cultural uniformity in favor of alternative
vantage points from which cultures appear maximally differentiated....
Other sciences select frameworks by how much regularity these
frameworks allow them to uncover. In contrast, most anthropologists
are disposed to select their frameworks so as to bring out the
maximum in particularity, contingency and variability (e.g. how
are the people they study unique?)."

John TOOBY & Leda COSMIDES,
1992, in J.H.Barkow, L.Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
New York : Oxford University Press.

"....the concept of "learning"
has, for the social sciences, served the same function that the
concept of "protoplasm" did for so long in biology.
....[eventually] "protoplasm" turned out to be a heterogeneous
collection of incredibly intricate functionally organized structures
and processes-a set of evolved adaptations, in the form of microscopic
molecular machinery such as mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Krebs
cycle, DNA transcription, RNA translation, and so on."

John TOOBY & Leda COSMIDES,
1992, in J.H.Barkow, L.Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
New York : Oxford University Press.

"I have studied young artists
who at age 20 all described their early lives as harmonious and
happy. Then at age 40, when we interviewed them again, those who
had been fairly successful still said in retrospect that they
had had a harmonious home life, but those who had gone through
a hard time and had become alcoholics or drug addicts all blamed
their parents."

M.CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, 1993, in Ciba
Foundation Symposium 178, The Origins and Development of High
Ability. Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.

"[Brigitte] Bardot was given
some stunning attributes by her Maker, progressed from adolescent
model to star very quickly, and was so gorgeous that she attracted
the Svengali interest of Roger Vadim.... Jeffrey Robinson [Bardot
- Two Lives] gives numerous and grim examples of the price
Bardot paid for her fame, including living under almost constant
siege from tourists and admirers when in St Tropez. A fragile
creature under the provocative exterior, there have been a number
of suicide attempts."

Hugo VICKERS, 1994, The Spectator,
27 viii.

"Sandra Scarr concedes that
parents can have important effects on children's motivation and
self-esteem, but she insists that, beyond a certain minimum level
of nurturing, they have little measurable impact on intelligence,
interests and personality."

Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'

New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.

"[George Washington Carver]
was born during the American Civil War, the son of Mary, a Negro
slave.... ....largely self-educated, he finally achieved his Bachelor
of Science degree at the age of 32, specializing in mycology (the
study of fungus growths).... He changed the agricultural and eating
habits of the South; he created single-handed a pattern of growing
food, harvesting and cooing it which was to lift Negroes (and
whites too!) out of the abject state of poverty to which they
had been condemned by their own ignorance.... ....he was one of
the first scientists to work in the field of synthetics, and is
credited with creating the science of chemurgy-'agricultural chemistry'.
The American peanut industry is based on his work. ....His death
[in 1943] was mourned all over the USA ....His father dead before
he was born; his mother abducted while he was a baby; born a Negro
slave in the deep South, weak and ailing; growing up in a poverty-stricken
house with hardly any books, with the white people who brought
him up not far from illiterate; denied schooling because of his
colour, having to piece together the rudiments of an education
while constantly hungry, and having to earn every penny he spent
by performing the most menial jobs imaginable, exposed all the
time to recurring traumas because of his colour; troubled by a
severe stammer assumed to have been brought on by his early abduction....this
kind of handicap is practically unknown today."

H.J.EYSENCK, 1995, Genius: the
Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.

Autism

"What I have been telling
my students about autism being caused by the failure of parents
to reinforce their children properly is obviously wrong. Now that
I know some parents of autistic children personally, I can see
that you are correct. Autism is a biological disorder,
and the parents are not the cause of it." Ivar LOVAAS, 1964,
in conversation with Bernard Rimland, Director of the American
Institute for Child Behavior Research. Autism Research Review
International 1.

"The idea that autism
- a condition in which children are unresponsive and unable
to communicate - is a result of a mother's failure to
bond to her infant has fallen out of favour in the United States....
Family studies provide compelling evidence for genetic involvement
in the disorder: the [concordance] rate is 50 per cent higher
than expected among siblings, and higher still among twins; as
many as 25 per cent of parents of autistic children have a language
disorder; and 15 per cent of their siblings have some kind of
learning disability."

N.HENESON, 1987, New Scientist,
8 i.

Parental deprivation

"The death of either
a parent or an older brother was experienced in childhood by 51%
of the [U.S.] Presidents and 45% of the [British] Prime Ministers.
This occurred to 22% of the Nobel Laureates and 41% of Roe's sample
of eminent scientists.... Compared to the average of 8% in the
general population experiencing early parental deaths, the percentages
for adult criminals [32%], adult psychiatric patients (especially
depressives) [27%], and eminent adults [28%] are high and quite
close to one another."

R.S.ALBERT, 1980. Reprinted
in R.S.Albert, Genius and Eminence.

New York : Pergamon.

"My father and mother
were dead [they had died of diphtheria around his third year of
life] and I used to wonder what sort of people they had been....
Throughout the greater part of my childhood, the most important
hours of my day were those I spent alone in the garden, and the
most vivid part of my existence was solitary.... Throughout my
childhood I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and of despair
of meeting anyone with whom I could talk. Nature and books and
(later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency.... There
was a footpath leading across the fields to New Southgate, and
I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide.
I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more
about mathematics."

Bertrand RUSSELL. Cited by
B.-A.SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The

Philosophers.
Oxford : Blackwell.

"Churchill, Charles Darwin,
Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth I, Edgar Allan Poe, and Martin
Luther all suffered from maternal deprivation.... the more you
study formulae for maternal success, the more you tend to conclude
that human achievement is a lottery."

Mary KENNY, 1983, Sunday
Telegraph.

"The evidence suggests
that, on the whole, humans are remarkably and gratifyingly resilient."

S.H.WOLKIND, 1982, reviewing
Maternal Deprivation Re-assessed.

"One of the most persistent
pieces of folk-lore is that children suffer if mother goes out
to work. Maladjustment and delinquency are the effects most commonly
predicted. Yet research evidence so far has not supported such
predictions."

"[Virginia, the mother
of U.S. President Bill Clinton] was widowed six months before
Clinton was born....Her travelling salesman husband, William Blyth,
was killed in a car crash.... [Clinton] was left with grandparents
while [his mother] went to New Orleans to pursue a degree in nursing
so she could raise her family. Then in 1950 she married second
husband, Roger Clinton, a car dealer and the man whose name Bill
adopted. He turned out to be a drunkard who often used his fists
on his wife after a bender. When Bill was 14, and already on the
way to his 6ft.2in., he stood up to his bullying stepfather. [His
mother says] "It went to forming Bill's character because
he had to be the man of the house in many ways." ....In
1968, Virginia was again widowed when Roger died from cancer.
She married a hairdresser a year later, but this third husband
died in 1974 from diabetes."

Allan HALL, 1992, The
Sun, 5 xi.

""[D.C.Rowe, 1994, The
Limits of Family Background, Guildford Press] selected two
groups of children under 11: the parents of one group had been
convicted of child abuse or neglect; in the other the parents
had no such convictions. The groups were carefully matched for
age, sex, race and social class. Some twenty years later....26%
of the abused or neglected group had been arrested for juvenile
delinquency; [but so had] 17% of the non-abused group.... Even
the claim that for normal development the infant must form a close
bond with a mother or mother substitute is now in doubt. The children
of the kibbutzim formed no such bonds but grew up to be normal
adults."

Stuart SUTHERLAND, 1994, The
Observer, 4 ix.

"....Eisenstadt (1978, Amer.Psychologist)
studied 699 famous historical figures and found that one in four
had lost at least one parent before the age of 10. By the age
of 15 the loss had exceeded 34%, and 45% before the age of twenty.
These losses almost certainly exceed those suffered by the average
citizen of those times.... [by the twentieth century] death of
mother or both parents by the age of 15 was three times more frequent
in the sample of eminent people than in the general population."

H.J.EYSENCK, 1995, Genius: the
Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.

Sibling rivalry

"At the age of seven, wee Sam
Coleridge head a fist-fight with his big brother Frank. Furious
at being punched hard in the face, Sam grabbed a kitchen knife
and would have stabbed Frank had his mother not appeared to save
the situation. Terrified of his mother, Sam ran to a river about
a mile from his native Ottery St Mary and fell asleep by the water's
edge. At five in the morning he woke up too weak to move and might
have died had he not be discovered by an old fox-hunting squire.
This incident haunted Coleridge's imagination so strongly that,
as late as 1828 (he died in 1834) he wrote a fragment about "a
little child/ In place so silent and so wild.""

Alan BOLD, 1996, Glasgow Herald,
20 i.

'Life stresses' and disasters

"[A seventy-year-old
victim of encephalitis lethargica] has survived the pressures
of an almost life-long, character-deforming disease; of a strong
cerebral stimulant; and of confinement in a chronic hospital from
which very few patients emerge alive. Deeply rooted in reality,
she has triumphantly survived illness, intoxication, isolation
and institutionalization, and has remained what she always was-a
totally human, a prime, human being."

O.W.SACKS, 1973, Awakenings.
Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"The impact of stress
on personality characteristics may, it seems, not normally be
very great."

Sheila M. CHOWN, 1983, Psychology
Survey 4.

"....of great interest
is the account by Elder of the life histories of women, first
seen in their early thirties at the time of the great depression,
and followed up after forty years. Those badly hit economically
in the depression appear to have survived the vicissitudes they
have had to face in later life rather better than those less deprived
in the depression. Elder concluded that 'the depression years
were an apprenticeship in learning to cope with the inevitable
losses of old age'."

Sheila M. CHOWN, 1984, British
Journal of Psychology 75.

"Both laypersons and
social scientists typically assume that psychological well-being
or happiness is a response to objective circumstances or events....
Responses from the General Well-being Schedule were examined for
4,942 men and women surveyed in a follow-up [after ten years]
of a national sample. Results showed substantial stability for
well-being scales [test-retest r's being around .45] for
the total group and for demographically defined sub-groups; and
stability coefficients were as high for those who had experienced
changes in marital or employment status or State of residence
as for those who had not."

P.T.COSTA, Jr., R.R.MacRAE
& A.B.ZONDERMAN, 1987,

British Journal of Psychology
78.

"There are methodological
difficulties in assessing the psychological impact of civil disorder
and terrorism. But, as well as can be judged from community surveys,
hospital admissions and referral data, psychotropic drug usage,
suicide and attempted suicide rates, and from assessment of the
actual victims of violence, [Northern Irish] society has not 'broken
down', nor has the [psychiatric] impact been judged considerable."
P.S.CURRAN (Mater Infirmorum Hospital, Belfast), 1988, British
Journal of Psychiatry 153.

"In a ten-year follow-up of
a national probability sample, widowed men and women showed little
or no difference from married individuals on measures of self-rated
health, activities of daily living, social network size, extraversion,
openness to experience, psychological well-being or depression."

P.T.COSTA et al., 1991, in
E.M.Cummings et al.,

Life-Span Developmental Psychology.
Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.

"Man is not merely the
sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a
hard nugget of self, a genetic gift. I believe only some master
principle of heredity, defying liberal theories of environmentalism,
can account for the profusion of human types, often manifested
within a single family. The self is malleable but elastic, snapping
back to its original shape like a rubber band."

Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex,
Art, and American Culture.

New York : Random House (Vintage
Books).

"Forty per cent of all patients
diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder drink heavily
(Wilson, 1988, Behav.Res.&Ther.), and their symptoms
subside when they abstain."

"When the Beirut hostages emerged,
they surprised everyone by their good humour. McCarthy, Waite,
Sutherland, Keenan and Anderson seemed not merely sane but practically
radiating health and happiness. How did they do it? After four
sets of memoirs, it still seems a mystery."

Alasdair PALMER, 1994, The Spectator,
7 v.

"Although there was psychological
impairment in some of the Jewish survivors, this book {Dorit Whiteman's
The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy - Voices of Those Who Escaped
before the Final Solution, New York, Plenum} gives added testimony
to the phenomenal adaptability and restorative power of the human
mind and body."

Leslie BERGER, 1995, Contemporary
Psychology 40.

"Twenty-three survivors of the
Jupiter cruise ship disaster completed the Impact of Events Scale....
[The ship sank off Athens, October 1988, after a collision, and
four deaths resulted.] ....greater early intrusion [of ideas,
thoughts and images] was associated with later symptom scores
....other work has shown that dysfunctional thinking is activated
is activated by stressful life events for those with a prior history
of depression (Miranda, 1992, Cognitive Therapy & Research
16). It is suggested, therefore, that prior depressive personality
might be important in moderating the relationship between early
intrusion and later symptoms in so far as it is a marker of dysfunctional
or negativistic thinking. ....other research has shown more guilt-provoking
causal attributions to be associated with intrusion."

S.JOSEPH et al., 1995,
Behaviour Research & Therapy 33.

"Helmreich spent more than six
years travelling the United States listening to the personal stories
of hundreds of [Holocaust] survivors.... What emerges is a picture
that is sharply different from the stereotypical image of survivors
as people who are chronically depressed, anxious or fearful."

Publisher's announcement for W.B.Helmreich,
1995, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful
Lives they made in America.

New
Brunswick, NJ : Transaction.

"....by the 1960's, interest
on [Greta Garbo's] investments was in the six-figure ballpark;
at any time, she could have liquidated or dipped into those holdings,
though the thought of doing so threw her into a state. Her anxieties,
as always, concerned her finances and her health. Although both
were in good condition, her increasing wealth was matched by increasing
anomie."

Barry PARIS, 1995, Garbo.
London : Sidgwick & Jackson.

Other genetic factors(e.g. epistasis [gene-gene interaction])

"It has now been demonstrated
that.... a single gene is sufficient to account for a wide range
of facts about human asymmetries for speech and handedness."

Marian ANNETT, 1978.

"Reliable psychiatric
diagnoses, new mathematical models, and recombinant DNA technology
have followed hard upon one another in the past decade to make
psychiatric genetics not only respectable, but suddenly big business.
Huntington's disease and narcolepsy have been tracked down on
the genome and, even as this review is being written, reports
are emerging {though they turned out to be over-optimistic} of
the genes for manic-depressive psychosis on Chromosome 11, Tourette
syndrome on Chromosome 18 and Alzheimer's disease on Chromosome
21."

S.LEWIS, 1987, British
Journal of Psychiatry 151.

New York : Plenum.

"Professor Lubs and his
colleagues (Child Development 57) studied sixteen families
in which the number of cases of dyslexia strongly suggested inheritance,
and analysed the chromosomes of the people involved. They concluded
that the pattern of occurrence of one third of cases was so strongly
linked to what appeared to be an abnormal gene situated on Chromosome
15 that the odds in favour of the abnormality being the prime
cause of the condition were overwhelming.... The fact that a single
gene can influence and even partially control the development
of a complete function such as reading implies that other brain
functions may be similarly controlled."

J.NEWELL, 1987, The Times
21 i.

"'Friendliness' is a
vague concept, but recent research at the University of Zurich
and at Cambridge suggests that people can agree on which cats
are more friendly (Animal Behaviour 34). And, it seems,
friendly cats often had the same fathers - even though
offspring and sire never met."

Reported in New Society
1543, 15 i 1987.

"[Tourette Syndrome (TS)]
is one of the most common single-gene disorders affecting men
. In most patients, the disorder starts with attention deficiency
and hyperactivity, followed some two or more years later by the
development of motor and vocal tics. Many patients require special
education because of letter, number, or word reversal, poor reading
ability, and poor retention of material read. This applies even
to those with a form of the disorder too mild to need treatment.
It is estimated that, among children who are not economically
disadvantaged, 10 to 30 per cent of conduct disorder may be due
to the presence of the TS gene."

John TIMSON, 1988, Biology
and Society.

(Summarising a report by
D.E.Comings et al., 1987,

Amer.J.Hum.Genetics 41.)

"Eye-movement dysfunctions,
detectable during smooth pursuit but not during saccadic movements,
occur in a majority of schizophrenics and in about 45% of their
first degree relatives.... [My evidence is that] when considered
together, schizophrenia and eye-movement dysfunctions can be accounted
for by a single autosomal dominant gene."

P.S.HOLZMAN (University of
Harvard), 1988, to 24th International

Congress of Psychology, in
Sydney (Abstract S 661).

"Scientists are homing
in on the faulty genes that predispose millions to mental and
emotional misery. Schizophrenia, manic depression, Alzheimer's
disease, even alcoholism-all are giving up their genetic
secrets."

Robin McKIE, 1989, The
Observer (The World), 4 vi.

"We are just beginning
to realise the importance of genomic imprinting (e.g. Monk, 1987,
Nature 328), a form of very early modulation of gene activity
that holds true for the life of that individual, but is erased
between generations. The same gene of identical DNA sequence and
position can be imprinted differently depending on whether it
is transmitted by a male or a female."

Editorial, Biology &
Society 6, ix.

"[K.Blum and E.Noble,
J.Amer.Medical Ass. 263] have found a gene long believed
tied to addiction in the brains of more than three-fourths of
a sample of thirty-five deceased alcoholics....The gene may work
by interfering with cells' receptivity to dopamine, a neurotransmitter
linked to pleasure. Individuals with the disorder might consume
alcohol because they have no normal access to 'feeling good'."

Brain/Mind Bulletin 15,
vi 1990.

Los Angeles, Box 42211.

"A pair of British MZA's
[monozygotic twins reared apart] who had met for the first time
as adults just a month previously, both firmly refused in their
separate interviews to express opinions on controversial topics;
since long before they discovered each other's existence, each
had resolutely avoided controversy. Another pair were both habitual
gigglers, although each had been raised by adoptive parents whom
they described as undemonstrative and dour, and neither had known
anyone who laughed as freely as she did until finally she met
her twin. Both members of another pair independently reported
that they refrained from voting in political elections on the
principle that they did not feel themselves well enough informed
to make wise choices. A pair of male MZA's at their first adult
reunion, discovered that they both used Vademecum toothpaste,
Canoe shaving lotion, Vitalis hair tonic, and Lucky
Strike cigarettes. After that meeting, they exchanged birthday
presents that crossed in the mail and proved to be identical choices,
made independently in separate cities.....

The existence of genetic
traits that are not (or are only weakly) shared by first-degree
relatives would be evidence for a neglected mechanism of non-additive
or configural genetic determination.....

The mammalian eye and the
hominid hand with its opposable thumb are multigenic, but they
are not constructed additively. If, at conception, one is short-changed
on eye genes, one does not develop a smaller but otherwise normal
eye.....

Traits that depend on configurations
of polymorphic genes that....segregate independently will be shared
by MZ twins, who share all their genes, hence all gene configurations,
but are much less likely to be shared by DZ twins, siblings or
parents and offspring. Such traits, although genetic, would not
tend to run in families." D.T.LYKKEN et al.,
1992, 'Genetic traits that may not run in families'. American
Psychologist, xii.

"Bramwell (1948)....re-examined
Galton's (1869) study of hereditary genius and concluded that,
of all the professions studied by Galton, only judges seemed to
aggregate within families. Bullough et al. (1981) compiled
additional data and noted that "....creative achievement
was rarely carried on in the same family beyond one generation...."

The Creative Personality
Scale is a 30-items measure of trait creativity that was essentially
derived through empirical keying using data from more than 1,700
persons, many of whom were architects, mathematicians, research
scientists and graduate students. {High scorers say they tend
to be relatively resourceful, insightful, individualistic,
reflectiveandintelligent.}.... [Our
correlation for monozygotic twins reared apart] is moderately
high (.54), whereas the dizygotic-twin-reared apart correlation
is low and not significantly different from zero. This finding
is consistent with the notion that creativity if an emergenic
trait."

N.G.WALLER et al.,
1992/3, Psychological Inquiry.

"Studies of twins provide strong
evidence for the heritability of manic-depressive illness. If
an identical twin has manic-depressive illness, the other twin
has a 70 to 100 percent chance of also having the disease; if
the other twin is fraternal, the chances are considerably lower
(approximately 20 percent)."

Kay R. JAMISON, 1995, 'Manic-depressive
illness and creativity.'

Scientific American 272,
ii, 47-51.

"Intraclass correlations for
peer reports (not corrected for lack of consensus among judges)
were between .31 (agreeableness) and .48 (openness) in the MZ
group [701 pairs] and between -.02 (neuroticism) and .28 (openness)
in the DZ [263 pairs]."

A.ANGLEITNER, R.RIEMANN & J.STRELAU,
1995, to International Society for the Study of Individual Differences,
meeting in Warsaw.

"[Separated at birth and reunited
thirty-nine years later,] each of the Jim twins, as [these MZ's
were called] was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty
pounds; they looked as much alike as any other identical pair.
At their reunion, they discovered that each had been married twice,
first to a woman named Linda and then to a woman named Betty.
Jim Lewis had named his firstborn child James Alan, and Jim Springer
had named his James Allen. In childhood, each twin had owned a
dog named Toy. They had enjoyed family vacations on the same beach
in Florida and had worked part time in law enforcement. They shared
a taste for Miller Lite beer and Salem cigarettes."

Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.

"[Tom Bouchard's MZ 'Jim twins']
were thirty-nine when reunited. Both had earlier married women
named Linda, then got divorced, then married women named Betty.
Both had served as sheriff's deputies in their respective Ohio
towns. Without ever seeing each other, both had vacationed at
the same beach resort on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Both liked
working with wood and had similar basement workshops....Each had
built a circumarboreal; bench around a tree in his yard....In
each case the bench was painted white. Both Jims drank Miller
Lite, chain-smoked Salems, liked stock-car racing, and did not
like baseball....On many different measures, Bouchard later reported
their test scores were about as close as those you would expect
from the same individual taking a test twice."

Daniel SELIGMAN, 1992, A Question
of Intelligence:

the IQ Debate in America.
New York : Carol (Birch Lane).

"....when there are epistatic
fitness interactions [between genes], sexual reproduction can
actually slow down evolutionary progress, by breaking up co-adapted
groups of genes as soon as they arise.... Because sexual reproduction
is almost universal, I wonder whether epistatic interactions can
be as widespread as is sometimes thought."

J.M.SMITH, 1987, Nature
329.

Nature-Nurture Interaction

"....paradoxically enough,
the influence of a good environment is most conspicuous where
the influence of a good heredity is most conspicuous."

C.BURT, 1943, British
Journal of Educational Psychology 13.

"....any characteristic
develops as a complex interaction between genes and environment.
Many of the ancient nature-nurture debates were thus futile. But
there is still the question - separate from that of an
individual's determinants - of how the differences between
individuals are determined by either set of factors."

Chris BRAND & Halla BELOFF,
1972,

British Journal of Social
and Clinical Psychology 13.

"....genetic and environmental
factors interact and cannot be considered to be independent of
each other."

M.RUTTER, 1975.

"....the interaction
between heredity and environment is so continuous, intricate,
variable, cumulative and specific that no general statement can
be made about their relative contributions."

S.H.STOTT, 1983.

"The concept of interaction
between biological and psychosocial variables seems to be one
of the most frequently praised ideas in psychology...."

K.UNGER, 1984, Science.

"[According to L.Sugarman,
(Lifespan Development) we clearly cannot ever hope to quantify
all the intensively interacting variables that are operative
in development. So we are entitled to work in terms of global
metaphors: "frameworks of description". This seems an
interestingly retrograde move. In the older sciences, relief from
the dilemma of infinite chains of causal influence came with common
sense. Although the total number of potential sources of variance
in any observed phenomenon are enormous, most have inconsequential
effects and may even cancel each other out."

P.M.A.RABBITT, 1987, Times
Higher Educational Supplement, 13 i.

"....it is a lot easier
to talk about G x E interaction than it is to find it."

"Currently researchers
in biogenetics find no compelling reasons to include interactions
in their models."

D.K.DETTERMAN, 1990, Behavioral
& Brain Sciences.

Nature-Nurture Covariation
and Transaction

"Circumstances certainly
make men, but Marx also believed that 'men make circumstances'."

Roger TRIGG, 1988, Ideas
of Human Nature.

Oxford : Blackwell.

"A person is the product
of his environment. His behaviour, in turn, shapes the environment
and, thus, the individual is able to modify the conditions under
which he lives."

F.KANFER, c. 1965,
Behavioural Self-Management.

"Bell (1968) was among
the first to indicate that the basic model of socialization -
the actions of parents on the child- might be
found wanting. Empirical studies suggested that congenital contributors
to child behaviour activate parental repertoires of response....
the correlations between parent and child behaviour could thus
be plausibly interpreted as indicating the effects of children
on their parents. Such views were important in urging that
the infant or young child was not merely a recipient of stimuli,
but played a part in its own development."

Ann M. and A.D.B.CLARKE,
1986,

Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry.

"....infants [themselves]
control the social stimulation on which their own development
depends."

C.TREVARTHEN, 1979.

"Milieu is that
part of the larger environment which is being shaped by the individual
and which is also being participated in and swept into the individual's
consciousness, so that external environment and individual consciousness
are fused into one, into what Whitehead called "mutual immanence",
a phrase he owed to William James. James' view of the interaction
of mind and environment breaks for once and all the hateful dualism
that Descartes gave to the world. For the empiricist James, mind
is no mirror, no circuited receiver, but a function, and
in this respect it is like breathing, eating, walking -
all functions in which the actor and the environment are in mutual
immanence. The special character of milieu is that the
only real environment exists in the consciousness of the actors
- philosophers, artists, scholars, scientists, all -
and thereby serves a catalytic function, while the consciousness
of the actors is an inalienable part of the surrounding environment."

Robert NISBET, 1982, Prejudices;
a Philosophical Dictionary.

Cambridge, Massachusetts
: Harvard University Press.

"Developmental studies
in general have failed to yield much evidence of strong relationships
between early environmental influences [from parents] and later
personality development. These negative results are probably more
comprehensible to parents than to psychoanalysts, who have been
too busy in their own prolonged training to try to influence their
own children. Siblings are different from the beginning [of
life] and develop into what they will in spite of our best efforts
to shape their behaviour. From their peers, and from the world
at large, they select what they want."

M.ZUCKERMAN, 1983.

"At each developmental
step, our personalities and intelligence lead us into contact
with experiences that match what we want, what we like, and what
we are interested in. We ignore things that we think are boring
or too difficult or too easy."

Sandra Scarr, interviewed
in Psychology Today, v 1984.

"The Colorado Adoption
Project was designed to give a straightforward and definite answer
to developmental psychology's most famous question: the relative
influence of nature and nurture.... The basic question is whether
the functioning of an adoptive child is influenced most powerfully
by genetic inheritance or the environment of the adoptive home.
The straightforward and somewhat surprising answer is that, in
general, neither has any major identifiable effect [in early infancy]....
There are many intriguing negative findings, and it may be that
these are explicable in terms of limitations on genetic expression
during the first years of life."

P.STRATTON, 1986, British
Journal of Psychology 77.

"....the difference between
an environment-personality correlation in non-adoptive and adoptive
homes estimates the extent to which genetic factors mediate correlations
between environmental measures and measures of personality....
The only relevant adoption study is the Colorado Adoption Project
whose data for infancy suggest substantial genetic mediation of
environment-personality relationships."

R.PLOMIN, 1986, Journal
of Personality 54.

"Which had the most influence
on me, my mother or my father? Heaven only knows, I don't think
either of them had! I think I had more influence on them.
Were they Conservatives? - I don't think I ever asked."

Norman Tebitt [Conservative
Party Chairman], 1986.

Interviewed by John MORTIMER,
The Spectator, 24 v.

"....data from three
relevant adoption studies suggest that about half the relationship
between environmental indices and IQ in non- adoptive homes is
due to genetic similarity between parents and their children."

R.PLOMIN, 1987, in S. &
Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus

and Controversy.
Brighton : Falmer.

"What studies have revealed
in recent years poses a fundamental challenge to conventional
wisdom about the importance of childhood environment. It is that
the environment shared by members of the same family has little
or no role in producing whatever personality similarities they
exhibit.... Behavioural geneticists are finding that genes account
for about 50% of the variance (that is, 50% of the range found
in a given study population) in most normally distributed traits.
Most of the remaining differences are attributed to environmental
influences unique to individuals - ranging from individual
parent-child interactions to peer influences to random events.
So, although the family environment may influence personality,
it does so in a non-uniform and therefore unpredictable way in
different individuals."

"Several studies have
shown that not only do parents influence the behavior of their
offspring, but, from birth onward, offspring influence the behavior
of their parents (e.g. R.Q.Bell, 1968, Psychol.Review;
R.Q.Bell & L.V.Harper, 1977, Child Effects on Adults....).
If so, and if the morphological appearance, mannerisms, and interests
of homosexuals tend to be inverted before puberty, parents are
likely to respond somewhat differently to homosexual offspring
than to heterosexual offspring, even before their orientation
per se is manifested.... several studies have found greater
parental hostility toward homosexual boys than toward heterosexual
boys, even during childhood, especially by fathers."

L.ELLIS & M.A.AMES, 1987,
Psychological Bulletin 101.

"With their concept of
transaction, R.S.Lazarus and S.Folkman [1984, Stress:
Appraisal and Coping] emphasise a dynamic relationship between
person and environment, which means that both, person and environment,
are involved in a reciprocal exchange that proceeds in time. The
concept of transaction seems to demand a microanalytic assessment
technique that follows the unfolding person-environment step by
step, i.e. as continuously as possible."

"....purely cultural
and purely genetic theories of transmission [of human differences
in reproductive characteristics, such as frequency of sexual intercourse,
twinning rate, and age at first pregnancy] may be giving way
to those based one gene-culture co-evolution in which epigenetic
rules are hypothesized to guide individuals to learn those patterns
of behavior maximally compatible with their genotypes [e.g. Rushton,
Littlefield & Lumsden, 1986, Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci. USA 83].
J.P.RUSHTON & A.F BOGAERT, 1988,

"....as twins grow up,
they grow apart. [Our meta-analysis of 130 twin studies] demonstrates
what some developmentalists have begun to deduce: the non-shared
environment {differing between different children growing
up in the same family} of siblings has been a neglected source
of experience in considering developmental process."

K.McCARTNEY et al.,
1988, to 24th International Congress

of Psychology, Sydney (Y
46).

"Rowe and Herstand (1986
Aggressive Behavior 12) found that although same-sex siblings
resemble one another in their exposure to violent programmes [on
TV], it is the more aggressive sibling who (a) identifies more
with aggressive characters, and (b) views the consequences of
the aggression as positive." J.P.RUSHTON, 1990, Canadian
Journal of Criminology 32.

"....the most important
aspect of the environment of any of an organism's traits are its
other traits."

"At last I have laid the ghost
that had haunted me for 45 years. My return visit to Pangbourne
College to speak to the sixth-formers went very well.... The atmosphere
of the place has changed beyond all recognition since my days
there, and my hosts were charming....

It is all something of a puzzle.
Could it all have been as terrible as I have always remembered
it or did I bring my own unhappiness to school with me at the
start of every term?.... I felt comfortable and at ease and all
the way home to Soho I kept wondering whether it could all have
been so awful all those years ago. If it was, perhaps it was just
as well if it toughened up that miserable boy who was so reluctant
to stray far from his mother's apron strings"

Jeffrey BERNARD, 1993, The Spectator,
6 iii.

"....about two thirds of the
reliable variance in measured personality traits is due to genetic
influence.... Current thinking holds that each individual picks
and chooses from a range of stimuli and events largely on the
basis of his or her genotype and creates a unique set of experiences
- that is, people help to create their own environments."

"The concept of genotype-environment
correlation, originally proposed by Plomin et al. (1977,
Psychol. Bull.) has been developed by Sandra Scarr (e.g.
1992, Child Development 63). When there is a correlation
between genetic and environmental effects, it means that people
are exposed to environments on the basis of their genetic propensities.
For example, if intelligence is heritable, then gifted children
will have, on average, intellectually gifted parents who provide
them with an intellectual environment as well as genes for intelligence.
Alternatively, the individual might be picked out as gifted and
given special opportunities. Even if no one does anything about
the individual's talent, the individual might gravitate toward
intellectual environments. These three scenarios represent three
types of gene-environment correlation: passive, reactive, and
active, respectively..... genes influence not only the amount
of television watched [Waller et al., 1990, Psychol.Science
1: rBIOL.SIBLINGS = .48; rADOPTEES=
.26] but also the nurturance of parents, the nature of the peer
group, the sense of well-being experienced and a host of life
history events."

"Identical twins tend to have
their first dates at about the same time and to date with equal
frequency. Their sexual dysfunctions also tend to be very similar.
They marry and begin having children at roughly the same points
in their lives. The only real difference between identical twins
lies in whom they choose to marry ....[although twins competing
for the same mate is a staple of television talk shows]. ....[In
the Minnesota study, separated MZ twins' spouses showed] a strong
correlation between twins and their spouses in regard to height,
physical attractiveness, education and traditionalism, but over
all the twins and their spouses had too little in common to explain
their selection of each other. ....twins' spouses were hardly
more alike than people who were married to unrelated individuals."

Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.

The genome

"Plomin's group [of psychogeneticists,
in Pennsylvania] employs a technique called allelic association
which uses large samples of unrelated individuals at the two extremes
of the IQ range and analyses DNA markers in or close to genes
having products of prima facie neurological relevance (such
as dopamine receptor protein and neurofilament protein)."

J.SLOBODA, Nature 362, 11
iii.

"In the December 1 issue of
Nature, Freedman and his colleagues report that they have
identified and cloned the gene that, when matched, causes a severe
hereditary obesity in mice. What's more, the Rockefeller group
has found that humans have a very similar gene."

Aye FLAM, 1995, Science 266,
2 xii.

Some adjudications

"....human nature, which
is certainly biological in its foundations [cannot] be treated
as though it were wholly biological, and thus equivalent to the
nature of other species. The difficulty is that the environment
for human beings is not merely physical, but cultural, not merely
the here and now, but historical, and culture and history become
internalised in a way that renders them no longer merely environmental.
They become constituent parts of the human organism, and the process
of socialisation, taking place in the formative stages of childhood,
moulds the developmental process in many of its psychologically
most important aspects.... The significance of the influence of
culture on intelligence has received a good deal of empirical
support in recent years from the work of Hunt, Bruner, Cole et
al., Lab, Lure and others...."

L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1979, Cyril
Burt: Psychologist.

London : Hodder & Stoughton.

"....the primary source
of variation in personality is chance, be it in the hazards of
development and the accidental experiences of the pre- and post-natal
environment, or in the random assortment and recombination of
genetic loci."

L.EAVES & P.A.YOUNG,
1981.

"....in the 1980's there
is a move towards a more biological perspective: the pendulum
is swinging back in Hans Eysenck's favour."

A.Gale, 1982, Nature,
27 v.

"Our brains, hands and
tongues have made us independent of any single features of the
external world.... Thus it is our biology that makes us free."

S.ROSE, L.KAMIN & R.LEWONTIN,
1984, Not in Our Genes.

Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"We start in search of
the individual, but instead of him, we will find fathers and sons,
husbands and wives, members of religious congregations, employers
and employees, artists and patrons, authors and readers.... The
individual can only know and define himself when acting and reacting
within such networks which are made, kept in repair, and modified
by him and his fellow-individuals."

E.KEDOURIE, 1984,

The Crossman Confessions
and Other Essays. London : Mansell.

"What has happened here
[in the work and review by L.J.Eaves, H.J.Eysenck & N.G.Martin,
1989, Genes, Culture and Personality] is that proponents
of nomothetic, scientific approaches to human psychological
differences are losing, at half time, by their own scrupulosity,
to their classic opponents, the champions of idiographic,
individuality-acknowledging approaches to personality. For the
present, only IQ is left as a variable that behaves like a paradigmatic
nomothetic personality trait - yielding generally greater phenotypic
similarity in closer relatives. In contrast, much of the rest
of adult personality now appears to emerge by magic."

C.R.BRAND, 1989, Nature
341, 7 ix.

"S.Oyama's under-recognised
The Ontogeny of Information (1985, Cambridge University
Press) carries out a deconstructive analysis of the gene-environment
dichotomy, without feeling it necessary to appeal to exotic intellectual
traditions."

John R. MORSS, 1992, Theory
and Psychology 2.

"The fashion is beginning to
change. The failure of liberal reforms to deliver the Great Society
has cast doubts on the proposition that better nurture can deliver
better nature. The failure of sociologists to find even a few
of the purported (Freudian or social) causes of schizophrenia,
homosexuality, sex differences in criminal tendencies and the
like has undermined their credibility. And a better understanding
of how genes work has made it possible for liberals who still
believe in the perfectibility of man to accept genetic explanations.
In at least one case-homosexuality-it is now the liberals who
espouse nature and their opponents who point to nurture."

'Nature or nurture?- Old chestnut,
new thoughts.'

The Economist, 26
xii 1992 / 8 i 1993.

"We know nothing about the heritability
of human temperamental and intellectual traits."

Richard LEWONTIN, 1993, Biology
as Ideology.

New York : HarperPerennial.

"Despite intellectual
acknowledgement of the essential duality of the origins of high
ability, most individual researchers are emotionally-sometimes
passionately-attached to the defence of one extreme."

J.SLOBODA, 1993, 'Weighing
of the talents'. Nature 362, 11 iii.

"[A curious statement, often
repeated in R.Plomin & G.E.McClearn, 1993, Nature, Nurture
and Psychology, American Psychological Association, is that]
the battle between nature and nurture was nonsensical, and that
it has been resolved by searching for a numerical solution on
the lines of how much, in what circumstances, for what trait.
The assumption that there were 100% hereditarians among the behavioural
geneticists will not stand up. Having been in the middle of that
battle, and having known many of the leading participants, I cannot
think of one who would have assumed anything so obviously silly
as a 100% genetic determination of any behavioural variable. The
imputation that there were any 100% hereditarians is simply untrue;
there were, and are, 100% environmentalists, and they carried
the day for many years, largely ignoring the available evidence,
or misrepresenting it. There never was a scientific argument
of either-or; it was always one of how much."

H.J.EYSENCK, 1994, Personality
& Individual Differences 17.

Epilogue: Emollient proposals

"I fully acknowledge
the great power of education and social influences in developing
the capacities of the mind, just as I acknowledge the effects
of use in developing a blacksmith's muscles."

Francis GALTON, 1869, Hereditary
Genius. London : Macmillan.

"[Emile Zola's] commitment
to hereditary determination of "feelings, desires, passions,
all human manifestations" was an integral part of a world
view that was characteristic of an anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical,
radical bourgeois of the Third Republic. It was....an attempt
to reconcile the facts of an unequal and hierarchical society
with the ideology of freedom and equality."

S.ROSE, L.KAMIN & R.LEWONTIN,
1984, Not in Our Genes.

Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"Both the Watsonians
and the Freudians....attribute to the action of the environment
a great deal of the formation of personality. In the Freudian
theory, it is repression, mainly of the sex instinct, which is
responsible. In Watson's it is association of fear (or rage, or
love) with situations other than the natural stimuli which plays
the major part. In both, the home life of the first two years
is all important. But both admit the influence of heredity. [Watson
said "Albert was extremely phlegmatic", otherwise his
conditioned fear of a white rat would have been more marked.].
It is the form which hereditary forces take which is determined
by the home, not the strength."

Godfrey H. THOMSON, 1924,
Instinct, Intelligence and Character.

London : George Allen and
Unwin.

"...Gone are the days, I hope,
when students would rebel when I talked in one lecture about innate
capacities and individual differences and in the next about the
different way in which character is formed in different cultures
systematically and how different the results were. Someone was
sure to go away muttering: 'She can't have it both ways.' But,
of course, we can...."

Margaret MEAD, 1972, in T.R.Williams,
Introduction to Socialization.

St Louis : Mosby.

"R.G.Collingwood [the
philosopher and historian of ideas]....attributes his passion
for learning to his father and to himself. It was his father's
doing, he writes, that he began Latin at the age of four and Greek
at six, but his own that he began,

"....about the same time,
to read everything that I could find about the natural sciences,
especially geology, astronomy, and physics; to recognise rocks,
to know the stars, and to understand the working of pumps and
locks and other mechanical appliances up and down the house. It
was my father who gave me lessons in ancient and modern history....
But my first lessons in what I now regard as my own subject, the
history of thought, was the discovery, in a friend's house a few
miles away, of a battered seventeenth-century book, wanting cover
and title-page.... I was about nine when I found it....""

B.-A.SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The
Philosophers. Oxford : Blackwell.

"Self-control and even
conscience seem to be much more modifiable by the influence of
education than is intelligence.... [So] it seems to be the function
of the teacher to form character and to find out about
intelligence. In so far as he can influence the latter, he will
do it through the former."

Sir Godfrey THOMSON, 1929.

"Most recent psychological
evidence indicates the necessity of remembering the importance
of both inherited characteristics and environmental conditions
for normal development."

Fred J. SCHONELL, 1948, Backwardness
in Basic Subjects.

"I accept the widely
held diathesis-stress theory of mental disorder."

H.J.EYSENCK, 1977.

"Ultimately, we believe
that human beings are bio-social organisms, and that work on individual
differences can be most fruitfully pursued by paying attention
to both these aspects of our nature." Editorial
statement of the journal Personality and Individual Differences
[Editor-in-Chief H.J.EYSENCK], 1980.

"....there is no contradiction
between the assertion that a trait is perfectly heritable and
the assertion that it can be changed radically by the environment."

S.ROSE, L.KAMIN & R.LEWONTIN,
1984, Not in Our Genes.

Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"Love-shyness is believed
to be the result of a genetic-biologically rooted temperament,
and of learning experiences with peers and family."

B.G.GILMARTIN, 1987, Journal
of Personality 55.

"Michael Bailey of Northwestern
University used advertisements in magazines to find sets of male
twins [of whom at least one was gay]. Looking at 110 pairs of
twins he found that if a homosexual man had an identical twin,
in 52% of cases he was also gay; if he had a non-identical twin,
in only 22% of cases was the twin also gay....[Whitam & Diamond
found MZ's 66% concordant and DZ's 30% concordant.] {In Britain,
King & McDonald, working from an AIDS clinic, with subjects
who had not been collected as volunteers for twin research,}
found 45 homosexuals who had twins; only eight reported that their
twin was also homosexual or bisexual. However, since some of the
fraternal pairs were of mixed sex, a lower concordance rate was
to be expected. And the difference between the identical twins
and fraternal twins still pointed in the same direction: 25% of
identical twins shared their co-twin's homosexuality, compared
with only 14% of fraternal ones....

Homosexual men are more likely
to have elder brothers than [are] heterosexual men. As women get
older, it appears that their immune systems become more likely
to reject male [high-testosterone] foetuses. If gay genes are
a defence, that would explain the observation. Of course, the
fact that gays are more likely to have elder brothers might also
be used as evidence for family structure as a cause."

The Economist, 5 xii
1992.

"The fashion is beginning
to change. The failure of liberal reforms to deliver the Great
Society has cast doubts on the proposition that better nurture
can deliver better nature. The failure of sociologists to find
even a few of the purported (Freudian or social) causes of schizophrenia,
homosexuality, sex differences in criminal tendencies and the
like has undermined their credibility. And a better understanding
of how genes work has made it possible for liberals who still
believe in the perfectibility of man to accept genetic explanations.
In at least one case-homosexuality-it is now the liberals who
espouse nature and their opponents who point to nurture."

'Nature or nurture?- Old
chestnut, new thoughts.'

The Economist, 26
xii 1992 / 8 i 1993.

"Genetic data provide some of
the best evidence we have for the importance of non-genetic influence.
In addition, genetics provides the designs that allow us to look
for environmental influences in a way that takes genetics into
account rather than trying to ignore it, as happens in studies
of regular families, whose members are of course genetically related.
When we find that parents who read to their children more often
have children who read better, we just can't assume that's a causal
environmental association."

R.PLOMIN,1993, in Ciba Foundation
Symposium 178, The Origins and Development of High Ability.
Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.

"Professor Lykken {1993,
J. Person. & Soc. Psychol.} questioned more than 900
pairs of twins and their spouses about their love life, with surprising
results. It turns out that the partners of pairs of twins are,
on average, barely more alike than any other two adults passing
in the street.... Again....in most cases one twin did not particularly
like (or dislike) their twin's mate; and the partners of twins
did not like or dislike the [other] twin any more than someone
might like the partner of a friend. "As far as we can see,"
says Professor Lykken, "whom people fancy and then marry
is not governed by any logical rules.... At best, similarity in
things like age, education, attractiveness and political leanings
narrows the field of suitable candidates by about 50 per cent.""

Jerome BURNE, 1993, The
Independent, 9 ii.

"....two identical twins separated
at birth [both kept themselves] exceptionally clean and tidy.
When asked why they did so, one replied that his adoptive mother
was a model of cleanliness and tidiness, the other that he was
reacting against his adoptive mother who was an absolute slob."

Stuart SUTHERLAND, 1994, The
Observer, 4 ix.

"[In the film, The African
Queen,] Katharine Hepburn, playing a missionary, pours Humphrey
Bogart's gin into the river, and a discussion about Bogart's vulnerability
to temptation ensues. 'But Missy,' he protests, 'it's just human
nature.' 'Nature,' replies Hepburn, 'is what we are put into this
world to rise above.'"